Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siecle

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Carol Siegel ◽  
Robert Ziegler ◽  
Darryl Hattenhauer
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

Hear My Desire: Rachmaninov’s Orphic Voice and Musicology’s Trouble with Eurydice

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-216
Author(s):  
Truman See
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Symphonic Poem ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

Stigmatized as kitsch, the music of Rachmaninov has largely been neglected by scholars. A reassessment has been made possible by recent historiography on late imperial Russia documenting the intelligentsia’s search for a messianic musician-bard, a role that several of Rachmaninov’s pre-revolutionary works take up, but not in the terms expected of them. Heard in relation to the Orpheus myth often invoked at the time, to the contemporaneous prevalence of psychoanalysis, and to the formal affinities between early modernist orchestral music and the unconscious, the music both assumes unforeseen significance and offers the possibility of a counterstatement to current musicological concerns with embodiment and presence. Amid these debates, Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem, Isle of the Dead (1909), emerges as an unexpectedly subversive work that sounds the futility of fin-de-siècle Russian utopianism while giving voice to an alternative, anti-metaphysical ethics. Meanwhile, the music points to a clandestine violence governing much of musicology’s ongoing fascination with the “drastic.” The resulting critique leads to the proposal of a reparative musicology capable of giving a sympathetic account of the cultural work of public mourning that Rachmaninov’s music performs in the concert hall today.

Beauty Raises the Dead. Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle

2001 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-517
Author(s):  
Brian O’Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Drug Induced ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siecle (review)

French Forum ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-134
Author(s):  
Rachel L. Mesch
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

„Ricomincio a respirare l’aria di quei paesi“. Zu einem ‚russischen‘ Naturalismus und seiner ästhetischen Entgrenzung in Opern von Umberto Giordano und Franco Alfano (1898–1904)

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 271-309
Author(s):  
Matthias Nikolaidis
Keyword(s):  
Formal Solution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Problematic Integration ◽  
Musical Exoticism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

The unexpected success of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) gave the starting signal for a turn of Italian opera to naturalism. The problematic integration of naturalistic plots into the melodramma was approached in part by means of musical exoticism. The recently started reception of Lev Tolstoy’s and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels could serve as basis for a re-evaluation of Russian subjects in fin de siècle Italian opera.Since the beginning of the 19th century, the Western image of Russia had been stamped by the contrast of tsarist glamour and the penal camps of Siberia. Umberto Giordano’s Fedora displays this dichotomy from a Parisian point of view. For Siberia, Luigi Illica contributed a libretto based on Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, in the composition of which Giordano sought to amalgamate the notions of naturalism, Russian exoticism and tragic love. With Risurrezione, Franco Alfano expanded in this direction by creating a powerful Russian atmosphere. His formal solution for the opera’s finale uses a juxtaposition of disparate material which evolves as a hallmark of musical realism.

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