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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... tragic variety, a preoccupa- tion with death dominates—and is associated with love—but the deaths are most frequently what we might call simply “dramatic” ones, that is to say, violent plot devices: stabbings, shootings, drownings. To ...
... tragic ending take over the operatic stage. It is not accidental, we argue, that this shift coincides with what Ariès presents as a change in the public atti- tude to death itself. No longer considered in terms of familiar- ity, death ...
... tragic narratives made them re- hearse and “re-rehearse” their encounter with death.22 Opera, we argue, can do the same thing, but we will not invoke the classical notion of tragedy—because the portrayal of death in the operas we will ...
... tragic tale of star-crossed lovers and their unnecessary deaths. To normalize Wagner's opera in this way is to misread its meaning: here death is not sad, bad, or unwanted. Nor is it so in any of the operas we discuss—operas that ...
... 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. The Contemplation of Death 1 And when he shall have 14 Introduction.
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 |