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. |
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... positive stories about death and dying (our shared fate) on audiences today and in the past. We ex- plore why, in Oscar Wilde's terms (which echo Sigmund Freud's): “We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter ...
... positively valued may seem counterintuitive. Today we have come to think of death rather differently from Renaissance playwrights or even nineteenth-century opera composers, in part because of major medical advances. Twentieth-century ...
... positive understanding and evaluation of death. That context may not be well known to modern audiences, however. In other chapters, less context will be required, in part because the operas discussed speak more directly to today's ...
... challenged when we are asked to think of death not as tragic or negative, but as positive. Think of this book, then, as an aid to imagining the unimaginable—death. 1 The Contemplation of Death And when he shall have 14 Introduction.
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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 |