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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... seen as part of a collective fate for everyone. When people understand that they are about to die, they become the cen- ter of a ritual, which they themselves organize, involving expres- sions of grief, the pardoning of others, prayer ...
... seen as the plunging of the individual into an “ irrational , violent and beautiful world , not desirable but admirable in its beauty . " The eroticiza- tion of death accompanies this return of an untamed force . Ariès calls this ...
... seen as a morbid condition that must be treated and shortened. This shift was associated with changes in funeral rites and other public manifestations of grief. As Sherwin B. Nuland writes in How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final ...
... seen as rupture and transgression, “admirable in its beauty,” and thus attractive in its operatic (aestheticized) form.20 The relationship between operatic conventions and no- tions of death (and therefore its acceptability as both a ...
... seen as a failure, at once med- ical and personal. The decline of belief in an afterlife has been part of the secularizing of death, as have major changes in how we deal with the dead in our funerary rites. Death has become both a taboo ...
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 |