Mimomania
Subtitle: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (California Studies in 19th Century Music)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: March 10, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 245
ISBN-13: 9780520239951
Subjects: Opera; c 1800 to c 1900; Music; Gesture in opera; Music/Songbooks; Genres & Styles - Opera; History & Criticism - General; Music / General; Instruction & Study - Theory; 19th century; Europe
First sentence: I don't pretend to be a great actor or a great singer.
Description: "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.

As Smart demonstrates, this productive fusion of music and movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Verdi baritone. Mimomania tracks such effects through readings of operas by Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner."--Jacket.