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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... sense. He calls this “forbidden” or “invisi- ble” death.9 He notes the displacement that has occurred as the provision of care moved from the family to the medical team, from the home to the hospital. Add to this the continuing tendency ...
... sense of our world. Narrative knowledge is a mixture of the cultural and the pragmatic that comes from and reinforces a set of social values and norms within a given group. In a sense, this knowledge is what tells us how to understand ...
... sense, death is the only (musical and liter- ary) subject matter of Wagner's music drama, its compulsively re- peated theme, intertwined forever with love. Pace Catherine Clément's ( in ) famous Opera , or 8 Introduction.
... sense that everything should be controllable—includ- ing disease and death. Add to this longer life spans and cultural shifts in attitudes to things like diet and exercise as modes of con- trol, and you have the modern sense that death ...
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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 |