Title: Mimomania : music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera /
Authors: Smart, Mary Ann.
Publisher: University of California Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Opera Europe; Gesture in opera.; Gestes à l'opera.; Opera Europe
Abstract: "When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac" ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. Mary Ann Smart suspects that Nietzsche may have seen and heard more than he realized. In Mimomania she takes his accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music - and that of several of his near-contemporaries - for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted.
Contents: In praise of overstatement -- Wagner's cancan, Fenella's leap ; La muette de Portici and Auber's reality effect -- Bellini's unseen voices -- "Every word made flesh" ; les Huguenots and the incarnation of the invisible -- Uneasy bodies : Verdi and sublimation -- Mimomania : allegory and embodiment in Wagner's music dramas.