The Modern Major Remodelling of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Alan Fischler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
Traditional Performance ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture ◽  
Recent Critic

Following the success of The Gondoliers (1889), Gilbert wrote to Sullivan: ‘It gives one the chance of shining right through the twentieth century.’ However, while this prophecy was largely fulfilled, clouds of cultural disapproval have darkened over the Savoy operas since the start of the present century, especially with regard to the mockery of women's education at the heart of Princess Ida (1884) and, most pointedly, the demeaning and ostensibly racist depiction of the Japanese in The Mikado (1885). On the other hand, the largely overlooked Utopia, Limited (1893) has experienced a boom in productions over the last decade, seemingly due to its subject matter, which, as one recent critic put it, make it ‘an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist comic opera’. He also argues that, while some of the traditional performance practices associated with The Mikado ought to be re-evaluated, recent objections to the spirit of the opera as a whole are not entirely justified, and that a re-evaluation of the validity of some (but not all) of the performance practices traditionally associated with The Mikado is both just and timely. Alan Fischler is a Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. He is the author of Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (University of Virginia Press, 1991) and ‘Drama’ in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), among many other articles on Gilbert and nineteenth-century theatre.

The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900: The Ars Combinatoria of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 243-268
Author(s):  
Julie M. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Found Objects ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Responses

AbstractThis article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.

Reforming the Religious Sonnet: Poetry, Doubt and the Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Kirstie Blair
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Geoffrey Hill ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture ◽  
The Church

This essay examines the tradition of ‘doubting’ poetics through an assessment of selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century sonnets. Through considering recent work on Victorian literature and culture, it argues for the importance of the poetics of faith in this period, and assesses the presence of nineteenth-century Christian, and particularly Anglican, forms and concepts in the genre of the sonnet. Analysing later twentieth-century sonnets by Geoffrey Hill and Carol Ann Duffy, it suggests that the sonnet remains vitally linked to the literature of faith and that these sonnets have vital links to their Victorian predecessors.

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