scholarly journals Images of War in Opera

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
Anastasia Siopsi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Political ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Western European

The main aim of this article is to raise questions with wars seen as part of cultural history attempting, thus, to provide a cultural reading. As such, I attempt to show operatic responses to war, to the meaning of violence, and to the ways they illustrate emotions that are at the core of such destructive activities (that is, patriotism, heroism and so forth) and depict wartime ideologies, practices, values and symbols. This paper is a critical and selective overview of images of war in opera mainly up to the twentieth century. There is no aspect in human activities which is not related, more or less, with the issue of war. War has been part of the total human experience. Subsequently, my paper is about the various ways of projecting images of war in opera. In more detail, it is about the ways that opera, since the era of its birth, responds to human conflicts, named wars, and bring on stage an interpretation: an illustration of a hero, a context of values related to the necessity or the avoidance of war, a message to humanity to make us look at our civilization in either positive or negative ways. A cultural contemplation is not about “truths” of the war but raises the question as to how different “truths” inhabit the political and cultural Western European world by means of the total work of art of opera. Opera has had a fundamental role in privileging some ideals of “truths” from others. The main aim is to raise questions with wars seen as part of cultural history attempting, thus, to provide a cultural reading. As such, I attempt to show operatic responses to war, to the meaning of violence, and to the ways they illustrate emotions that are at the core of such destructive activities (that is, patriotism, heroism and so forth) and depict wartime ideologies, practices, values and symbols.

BANDITS, ELVIS, AND OTHER MYSTICS: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-592
Author(s):  
Eric Van Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
San Diego State University ◽  
Power Of God

Paul Vanderwood, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, died in San Diego onOctober 10, 2011, at the age of 82. A distinguished and innovative historian of modern Mexico, Vanderwood authored or co-authored several books, mostly dealing with the political, social, and cultural history of Mexico between about 1860 and the mid-twentieth century. The four works for which he is best known are Disorder and Progress (1982), The Power of God Against the Guns ofGovernment (1998), Juan Soldado (2004), and Satan's Playground (2010), and they are discussed extensively in this interview.

scholarly journals Living for creating, painting for staying sane. The complex story-board of Charlotte Salomon

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Articoni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Working Out

The talent of Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish artist from Berlin, takes shape during Nazism. Her artistic development is concentrated in a single work, Life? Or Theatre?, whereby the author retraces her life in a style bringing together painting with comics, cinema, music. A total work of art as it is embodied in and hinged on her own life, and the only Gesamtkunstwerk is one where the work is an extension of her own existence, where everything becomes art.Salomonʼs work is much more than a diary: it is a way of working out grief and mourning, a stratagem for reacting and driving out pain in the madness of Nazi Germany. It is a ‘graphic novelʼ hybridizing codes and languages with an overflowing expressive power, in which each panel is a story in itself, it is staged memory, the private and public twentieth-century obscenity dealt with and thought out by means of words, images and music, with characters, dialogues, breaks, changes in perspective.

Why History?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Way

What is the point of history? Why has the study of the past been so important for so long? Why History? A History contemplates two and a half thousand years of historianship to establish how very different thinkers in diverse contexts have conceived their activities, and to illustrate the purposes that their historical investigations have served. At the core of this work, whether it is addressing Herodotus, medieval religious exegesis, or twentieth-century cultural history, is the way that the present has been conceived to relate to the past. Alongside many changes in technique and philosophy, Donald Bloxham’s book reveals striking long-term continuities in justifications for the discipline. The volume has chapters on classical antiquity, early Christianity, the medieval world, the period spanning the Renaissance and the Reformation, the era of the Enlightenment, the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and developments down to the present. It concludes with a meditation on the point of history today.

Hoffmann, Josef Franz Maria (1870–1956)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Czech Republic ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Classical Architecture

Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian architect and designer who proved instrumental in formulating the aesthetics and theory of modernist design. Among the most progressive architects in turn-of-the-century Austria, he was a founder of the Vienna Secession and the Wiene Werkstätte. His early work was aligned with Jugendstil, the German and Austrian manifestation of Art Nouveau, but graduated towards an abstract, geometric simplicity that anticipated twentieth-century Modernism. Committed to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), Hoffmann applied his talents to architecture, interior design, furniture and metalwork. His greatest achievement is the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, a true Gesamtkunstwerk in which all elements are synthesized into symphonic unity. Born in Pirnitz, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), Hoffmann studied at the Higher State Crafts School in Brno and at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He worked in the office of proto-modernist architect Otto Wagner, where he met future collaborator Joseph Maria Olbrich. He won the Prix de Rome in 1895, which gave him the opportunity to study classical architecture, and Mycenaean influences proliferated in his early work. Hoffmann was among the group of artists, architects and designers who seceded from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897, objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies.

Revisiting “The Art of Being Fragile”: Why cultural psychology needs literature and poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga V. Lehmann ◽  
Svend Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Core

Writers devote their lives to find words that faithfully resemble what is at the core of human experience and existence. Thus, psychologists interested in understanding human development in everyday life could turn toward writers and poets with humble curiosity. In this article, we illustrate how a narrative analysis of a work of art can be done, taking “ The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life” by the Italian writer and teacher Alessandro D’Avenia as a case. In addition, we reflect upon the mastery with which the author sheds light on aspects that theories in cultural psychology have tried to unveil. Such aspects are: (a) poetic activism: a revolution of the poetics of everyday life; (b) the poetics of human development; (c) the beauty within the fragile as a master; and (d) the intuition of the spirit as an invitation.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

Emmanuel Levinas (1906—1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes—the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others—speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. Other essays focus on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized Levinas and found him wanting. This volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas’s philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying how his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

BANDITS, ELVIS, AND OTHER MYSTICS: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 563-592
Author(s):  
Eric Van Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
San Diego State University ◽  
Power Of God

Paul Vanderwood, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, died in San Diego onOctober 10, 2011, at the age of 82. A distinguished and innovative historian of modern Mexico, Vanderwood authored or co-authored several books, mostly dealing with the political, social, and cultural history of Mexico between about 1860 and the mid-twentieth century. The four works for which he is best known are Disorder and Progress (1982), The Power of God Against the Guns ofGovernment (1998), Juan Soldado (2004), and Satan's Playground (2010), and they are discussed extensively in this interview.

District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919 to 1947

1982 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Steel Frame ◽  
The Political ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
The Core ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Policy ◽  
History Of

The paradox of the authoritarian rule of the Indian Raj at the heart of Britain's liberal empire was one that ran continuously through the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Both as the unpaid arsenal of Eastern expansion and defence, and as the essential stop-gap to Britain's multilateral pattern of trade, India was the necessary if incongruous adjunct of Liberal England, supporting the doctrines of progress at home on the basis of the autocratic control of its British-born hierophants over the numberless ‘contented masses’ of the Indian countryside. The resulting contrast between the increasingly self-governing white dominions, and the Indian maverick upholding in chains the very fabric of the empire, was also reflected in the political thinking of the motherland itself, by way of the stresses and contradictions which the conditions of the Raj's existence served to create within the liberal framework of the Victorian intellectual world. At the core of the Victorian liberal empire stood the strictly paternalistic government of the Raj in India; at the centre of the ‘benevolent despotism’ that British rule in the subcontinent adopted stood the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, ‘much more of a government corporation than of a purely civil service’ and the creator as much as the executor of British policy there.

scholarly journals Ópera, texto y audiovisualización. Estudio de un caso: "El anillo del Nibelungo"

2017 ◽  
pp. 136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaume Radigales ◽  
Yaiza Bermúdez Cubas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Musical Drama ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Global Performance ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

La ópera es un espectaculo globalizado, una Gesamtkunstwerk (obra de arte integral) según las teorías de Richard Wagner. Esa interacción de elementos convergentes (música, texto, canto, puesta en escena) culmina con la incorporación de la pantalla como parte integrante del montaje escénico desde finales del siglo XX. En este texto nos fijamos en el proceso de la audiovisualización de la ópera como espectáculo con el estudio de un caso: el montaje de El anillo del Nibelungo de Richard Wagner realizado por Carlus Padrissa y estrenado en el Palau de las Arts de Valencia (2007). En él, la interacción de la pantalla era fundamental para la comprensión del drama musical wagneriano. Opera is a global performance, a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) according to the theories of Richard Wagner. This interaction of converging elements (music, text, singing, staging) culminates with the incorporation of the screen as part of staging since the late twentieth century. In this paper we look at the process ‘audiovisualisation’ of the opera as performance with a case study: the production of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung by Carlus Padrissa and premiered at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia (2007). In it, the interaction of the screen was essential to understanding the Wagnerian musical drama.

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