The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera, Part 1: Locales and Peoples

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
Ralph P. Locke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Present Article ◽  
French Opera ◽  
The People ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Don Carlos ◽  
As If ◽  
Character Types

Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from “us” Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and “Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, including the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens. The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented. These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either all-purpose style markers of the exotic generally or more specific style markers associated with identifiable peoples or regions. But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably “point to” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent. In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. The composers involved include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Cherubini, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos). Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.

Opera for the People

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Preston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Women Managers ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The People ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Musical Theatre

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a completely forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This work challenges a common stereotype that opera in nineteenth-century America was as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest to a niche market. It also demonstrates conclusively that the historiography of nineteenth-century American music (which utterly ignores English-language opera performance and reception history) is completely wrong. Based on information from music and theatre periodicals published in the United States between 1860 and 1900; letters, diaries, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and other performance materials; and reviews, commentary, and other evidence of performance history in digitized newspapers, this work shows that more than one hundred different companies toured all over America, performing opera in English for heterogeneous audiences during this period, and that many of the most successful troupes were led or supported by women—prima donna/impresarios, women managers, or philanthropists who lent financial support. The book conclusively demonstrates the continued wide popularity of opera among middle-class Americans during the last three decades of the century and furthermore illustrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which eventually led to the emergence of American musical comedy.

scholarly journals Genres and Multilingual Contexts: The Translational Culture of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandrani Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Multiple Languages

Nineteenth-century Calcutta has been widely researched to understand its role in the making of a ‘modern’ India. However, the ‘translational’ culture of this period has not received enough attention. The present article traces what it terms Calcutta’s ‘translational culture’ by examining a palimpsest of languages and genres through the mediating role of translation. Nineteenth-century was a time when several languages were competing for space in the making of modern Bengali prose. Most of the writers of the time were negotiating a plural and multilingual domain and experimenting withnew styles of prose and poetry writing. Two such examples can be seen in the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824 –1873), and Kaliprassana Singha (1841 -1870). These writers were instrumental in the making of new genres and were negotiating multiple languages and linguistic registers that included –Sanskrit, Bengali with its different elite and colloquial registers, English,and several European languages and literatures. In juxtaposing Dutt and Singha, the present article attempts to point towards a parallel history of the nineteenth-century Calcutta traced through moments of transactions, translations,and negotiations among languages, ideas,and world views. Languages and literary genres in this case become a testimony to the rich texture of social and cultural negotiations that went into the making of the modernist Bengali prose and indicative of its palimpsestic and translational nature.

scholarly journals La danzatrice di Aquileia e gli spettacoli scenici in età tardoantica

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Ghedini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Rich

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider a little sculpture which represents a young woman who dances, found in Aquileia at the end of nineteenth century. The original work, which can de dated – as Sperti suggests – in the fourth century, confirms the diffusion of these little works in marble or stone in the late antiquity. The subject is also interesting because it is related to the spectacles which were the most important occasion of amusing for the people. The artists performed not only in the theatres and in the circuses but also in the private houses or villas, during the convivial occasions. The little sculpture, which perhaps decorated one of the rich residences in Aquileia, testifies the importance of performances of mimes, pantomimes, dancers in the late antiquity society and the honors that were paid to them.

The History Of Modern Vaccination In Cooch Behar State In The Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vaccination Programme ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
The State ◽  
The People ◽  
Small Pox ◽  
Preventive Method ◽  
History Of

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   

Living Same-Name Siblings and British Historical Demography

2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
Vital Registration ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Registration Data ◽  
Vital Registration Data ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Isle Of Skye

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.

Flâneur or Choraster: A Review of the Travel Narrator In the Formation of the Tourist Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-562
Author(s):  
Stephen Wearing ◽  
Stephen Schweinsberg ◽  
Patricia Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The People ◽  
Tourist Experience

Media representations of destinations play a powerful role in tourism appeal. The narrator assumes a role infused with knowledge and power, employing discourse to describe and interpret places and people to entice armchair audiences to not only travel vicariously alongside them, but to follow in their footsteps. This review article uses the English actor and writer Michael Palin to examine this phenomenon through the lens of the flâneur and choraster. Palin's travels have traditionally been viewed based on their ability to create space from the perspective of a representational voice of authority. In the present article, we wish to ask whether the power of the travel narrator for tourism is perhaps better expressed in their ability to develop a counter (or chora discourse), one where we are able to see space as locally contested. Palin's narrator expresses appreciation of his reliance on the people (chora) that inhabit the spaces he visits. His narrations of travel evidence how the flâneur perspective is influenced (and/or disrupted) by a chora in two ways—that which influences the perspective before travel and directs the gaze, and those that occupy and inscribe meaning on the spaces that are traveled to, that influences and/or forms experience.

The Challenge of Mass Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The State ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Mass Democracy

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.

scholarly journals PINDAR, OLYMPIAN 2.5–7, TEXT AND COMMENTARY—WITH EXCURSIONS TO ‘PERICTIONE’, EMPEDOCLES AND EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 499-517
Author(s):  
M.S. Silk
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Good Evidence ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
As If

In 1998, I suggested a new text for a notably corrupt passage in Pindar's Isthmian 5. This article is in effect a sequel to that earlier discussion. In the 1998 article, I proposed, inter alia, that the modern vulgate text of I. 5.58, ἐλπίδων ἔκνισ’ ὄπιν, is indefensible and the product of scribal corruption in antiquity, and that chief among the indefensible products of corruption there is the supposed secular use of ὄπις, as if used to mean something like ‘zeal’. This (as I hope to have demonstrated) is a sense for which there is no good evidence in classical Greek, where ὄπις always has a delimited religious denotation, meaning either (a) ‘gods’ response’, ‘divine retribution’, or else (b) ‘religious awe’ or ‘reverence’ towards the gods, through fear of that response or that retribution. If we discount I. 5.58 itself (and likewise the focus of the present article, O. 2.6), all the pre-Hellenistic attestations can be straightforwardly listed under these headings: (a) Il. 16.388 θεῶν ὄπιν οὐκ ἀλέγοντες, Od. 14.88 ὄπιδος κρατερὸν δέος, Hes. Theog. 221–2 θεαὶ . . . | . . . ἀπὸ τῷ δώωσι κακὴν ὄπιν, Pind. P. 8.71–2 θεῶν δ’ ὄπιν | ἄφθονον αἰτέω, sim. Od. 20.215, 21.28, Hes. Op. 187, 251, 706, along with, seemingly, a fragmentary fifth-century Thessalian verse inscription, CEG 1.120.1 Hansen; (b) Hdt. 9.76.2 θεῶν ὄπιν ἔχοντας, 8.143.2. In addition, one other instance can be interpreted as either (a) or (b), or in effect both: Od. 14.82 (of the suitors) οὐκ ὄπιδα φρονέοντες . . . οὐδ’ ἐλεητύν. In all cases, though, ‘gods’ are specified, usually as a dependent genitive with ὄπις, or else separately but in the near context. Hellenistic and later occurrences of the word are few, and (as I argued in 1998) hints there of a secular reading can actually be taken to reflect misunderstandings based on, precisely, the early corruption in I. 5.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document