Opera: The Art of DyingOur modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In "Opera: The Art of Dying" a physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art imparts. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of "contemplatio mortis"--a dramatized exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror of death (in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites"); the longing for death (in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"); preparation for the good death (in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"); and suicide (in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). In works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and even right morally, psychologically, and artistically--how, in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give life meaning. |
From inside the book
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... change in the attitude to death : honor- able death in war was recast as wasteful death . World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust completed the move of death and [To view this image, refer to the print version of Music and " Murky ...
... changes in funeral rites and other public manifestations of grief. As Sherwin B. Nuland writes in How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, “Modern dying takes place in the modern hospital, where it can be hidden, cleansed of its ...
... change in the public atti- tude to death itself. No longer considered in terms of familiar- ity, death was now seen as rupture and transgression, “admirable in its beauty,” and thus attractive in its operatic (aestheticized) form.20 The ...
... death, as have major changes in how we deal with the dead in our funerary rites. Death has become both a taboo and an obsession (witness the usual violent fare on television or at the movies). Contemporary Music and “Murky Death” 11.
... changes in the meaning of death through the ages. Our hunch is that the historical imagination of today's spectators is decidedly going to be challenged when we are asked to think of death not as tragic or negative, but as positive ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Richard Wagners Tristan and Isolde | 45 |
Living while Dying in Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen | 73 |
4 Orphic Rituals of Bereavement | 96 |
Staging Suicide | 123 |
6 The Undead | 146 |
Be Acquainted with Death Betimes | 184 |
Notes | 189 |
Acknowledgments | 233 |
Index | 235 |