Opera and Modern Culture
Subtitle: Wagner and Strauss
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: November 1, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9780520241732
Subjects: Opera; Social aspects; Music; Composers & Musicians - Classical Vocalists; Wagner, Richard,; Biography / Autobiography; Sex in opera; Philosophy and aesthetics; Genres & Styles - Classical; Genres & Styles - Opera; Music / General; Strauss, Richard,; 1813-1883; 1864-1949; Operas
Description: "Opera is legendary for going to extremes - a tendency that has earned it a reputation for unreality. Opera and Modern Culture shows the reverse to be true. Kramer argues that for the past two centuries the preoccupation of a group of famous operas with the limits of supremacy and debasement helped to define a normality that seems the very opposite of the operatic. Exemplified in a series of beloved examples, a certain idea of opera - a fiction of opera - has contributed in key ways to the modern era's characterizations of desire, identity, and social order. Opera and Modern Culture exposes this process at work in operas by Richard Wagner, who put modernity on the agenda in ways no one after him could ignore, and by the young Richard Strauss. The book continues the initiative of much recent writing in treating opera as a multimedia rather than a primarily musical form. From Lohengrin and The Ring of the Niebelung to Salome and Elektra, it traces the rich interplay of operatic visions and voices and their contexts in the birth pangs of modern life."--BOOK JACKET.