scholarly journals The Flying Dutchman, English Spectacle and the Remediation of Grand Opera

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Vernacular Art ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Liberal Imagination ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
German Opera

AbstractRichard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered ‘upon a new path, that of Revolution against our modern Public Art’, that is,grand opéra. Wagner’s revolution has often been described in light of the poetics of return and homecoming that contributed a new sense of identity to (German) opera. The present article is written against the grain of this conviction, and highlights the cosmopolitan career of the phantom ship and of the vernacular art forms – the nautical theatre and the phantasmagoria – that maintained the seafaring image at the forefront of the liberal imagination, first in Britain, and then in Paris, where Wagner arguably seized on it. Specifically, it explores the significance of ‘apparitional images’ to mid-nineteenth-century opera and Wagner’s turn to a regime of modern spectacle, inspired by the art of phantasmagoria, inDer fliegende Holländer.

Opera through Varying Theological Lenses

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-327
Author(s):  
Frederick Hale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Considerable Degree ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Holy Grail ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Although a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to Richard Wagner and his renowned works since the nineteenth century, and considerable attention has been given to Christian interpretations of them from continental European perspectives, many theological perspectives on the man and his operas in the English-speaking world have remained unilluminated. The present article seeks to redress aspects of that neglect by examining how two theologically educated British Nonconformists, namely P.T. Forsyth and Ramsden Balmforth (the latter of whose ministerial career was in Cape Town from 1897 until 1937) understood Wagner’s opera about the Holy Grail, Parsifal. It is argued that Forsyth’s interpretation was informed in large measure by his evolving understanding of the meaning of the Atonement and redemption, while Balmforth’s was shaped to a considerable degree by his Fabian socialism.

Die Sieger and Die Wibelungen: How Parsifal is the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-270
Author(s):  
Paul Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Strong Belief ◽  
German Opera

Abstract Nineteenth-century German opera composer Richard Wagner was very knowledgeable about Buddhism and its teachings, at least for a European of that time, and he incorporated his knowledge of those teachings into his last five music dramas: The Ring of the Nibelung (a four-opera cycle) and his final opera, Parsifal. The Ring is traditionally performed separately from Parsifal, but this article explains how there is a basis to connect these five great works into one cycle, even to the extent where the performance of a five-opera cycle would one day become a reality. The basis for this connection includes Wagner’s own strong belief in reincarnation, as well as Buddhism’s general teaching and explanation of karma and rebirth.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Capturing the Art of Public Service: The Government’s Perspective

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Tony Carrizales
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Virtual Museum ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
Art Forms

Public Service, in popular culture, can be viewed through many artistic lenses. Although there has been a consistent negative portrayal of government through art forms such as film and television, this research looks to review how government institutions in the United States have used art to provide a positive portrayal of public service. Eight forms of public service art are outlined through a content analysis of the holdings at the Virtual Museum of Public Service. The findings show that government and public entities have historically and continually engaged in promoting public service through art. Many of these public art examples are accessible year round, without limitations, such as buildings, statues, and public structures.

Grand Illusion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

scholarly journals Johann Michael von Hermann (1793–1855): A predecessor of Max Schweidler?

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 239-270
Author(s):  
Susanne Wagini ◽  
Katrin Holzherr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Early History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conservation History ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paper Conservation

Abstract The restorer Johann Michael von Hermann (1793–1855), famous in the early nineteenth century, has long fallen into oblivion. A recent discovery of his work associated with old master prints at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München has allowed a close study of his methods and skills as well as those of his pupil Ludwig Albert von Montmorillon (1794–1854), providing a fresh perspective on the early history of paper conservation. Von Hermann’s method of facsimile inserts was praised by his contemporaries, before Max Schweidler (1885–1953) described these methods in 1938. The present article provides biographical notes on both nineteenth century restorers, gives examples of prints treated by them and adds a chapter of conservation history crediting them with a place in the history of the discipline. In summary, this offers a surprising insight on how works of art used to be almost untraceably restored by this team of Munich-based restorers more than 150 years before Schweidler.

The Round Temple in the Forum Boarium

1960 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. E. Strong ◽  
J. B. Ward-Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Definitive Solution ◽  
Restoration Work ◽  
The Temple ◽  
General Opinion ◽  
Ancient Remains

The name and date of the little round temple in the Forum Boarium at Rome (popularly known as the ‘Temple of Vesta’) are long-standing problems of Roman topography. Its identification is still quite uncertain. On the chronology, however, general opinion seems to have hardened and, for reasons which are discussed below, most scholars appear now to believe that the building is Augustan, rejecting the attractive theory of Altmann and Delbrueck that it was erected some time in the later second century B.C. The present article is not concerned at all with the problem of identification, nor does it attempt the full and detailed study of the design and construction without which a definitive solution of the problem of dating is clearly impossible. Its purpose is twofold: to draw attention to some significant features of the architectural design and decoration, and to illustrate and discuss some surviving fragments which can be shown to belong to the lost entablture, but which seem hitherto to have escaped attention.The foundations of the temple were first exposed by Valadier in the early nineteenth century, in the course of restoration work undertaken to free the building of later accretions and to consolidate the ancient remains.

Reading a staging/Staging a reading

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Levin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
National Party ◽  
Critical Reading

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production of Der fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.

Do International Organizations Enjoy Immunity Under Customary International Law?

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Practice ◽  
International Law ◽  
Present Article ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Domestic Courts

The present article considers whether there is “a general practice accepted as law” establishing rules of customary international law on the immunity of international organizations from the jurisdiction of domestic courts. Apart from treaties, there does not appear to be a great deal of practice or opinio juris on the immunity of international organizations. And while there are many treaties dealing with the matter, their significance for the generation of a rule of customary international law seems questionable. This article sketches the historical development of the immunity of international organizations since the nineteenth century, describes various approaches that have been suggested to this question, and sets out such practice as there is and academic consideration of that practice. It then considers whether practice has to date generated any rules of customary international law regarding immunities, and finally suggests some conclusions.

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