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"Opera Political aspects History."
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The politics of opera : a history from Monteverdi to Mozart
The Politics of Opera\" takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and an array of music by such greats as Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics--through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs--has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. Cohen begins with opera's emergence under Medici absolutism in Florence during the late Renaissance--where debates by humanists, including Galileo's father, led to the first operas in the late sixteenth century. Taking readers to Mantua and Venice, where composer Claudio Monteverdi flourished, Cohen examines how early operatic works like Orfeo used mythology to reflect on governance and policy issues of the day, such as state jurisdictions and immigration. Cohen explores France in the ages of Louis XIV and the Enlightenment and Vienna before and during the French Revolution, where the deceptive lightness of Mozart's masterpieces touched on the havoc of misrule and hidden abuses of power. Cohen also looks at smaller works, including a one-act opera written and composed by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain
The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.
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Opera and the political imaginary in old regime France
\"From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragمaedie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera's political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What's more, opera's creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre's larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre's distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrمaegime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.\" --Amazon.com.
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Staging the Nation
Opera was a prominent political forum and a potent force for nineteenth-century nationalism. As one of the most popular forms of entertainment, opera could mobilize large crowds and became the locus of ideological debates about nation-building. Despite its crucial role in national movements, opera has received little attention in the context of nationalism. In Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary, Krisztina Lajosi examines the development of Hungarian national thought by exploring the theatrical and operatic practices that have shaped historical consciousness. Lajosi combines cultural history, political thought, and the history of music theater, and highlights the role of the opera composer Ferenc Erkel (1810-1893) in institutionalizing national opera and turning opera-loving audiences into a national public.
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Opera, society, and politics in modern China
\"Explores the themes of opera, city, and space in the context of the extensive theatrical reform movement that took place in China in the twentieth century. Illustrates the \"politicization\" of Chinese opera to understand the implications of \"modern\" theater experiences and its changing features\"--Provided by publisher.
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Opera and the city : the politics of culture in Beijing, 1770-1900
In late imperial China, opera was an integral part of life and culture, shared across the social hierarchy. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history.
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Opera and the City
In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values.
It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
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Resisting spirits : drama reform and cultural transformation in the People's Republic of China
\"Resisting spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers' experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials--such as theatre troupes' annotated practice scripts--with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China's social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene's intervention is \"just reading\": the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao's inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Focusing on these concerns points to continuities and ruptures in the cultural history of modern China beyond the bounds of \"campaign time.\" Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, including that surrounding Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by exploring ghost plays such as Li Huiniang that at first appear more innocent. To the contrary, Greene shows how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.\"--Provided by publisher.
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Argentinian Telenovelas
This work explores the way in which telenovelas (TV serial dramas) give voice to contemporary and historical Argentinian social and political issues. Telenovelas have multiple layers of socio-cultural message -- local as well as global -- and are invariably laden with appealing drama and emotion, and sometimes comedy. The discussion focuses on how telenovelas reflect society's perception of, and adjustment toward, issues of globalisation. They are a means of portraying how individuals and families rationalize and incorporate rapid social and economic changes. The book explores how telenovelas might offer a subversive interpretation of reality; or provide a channel of dialogue with the government's political aims. The author challenges the assumption that they are merely a reflection of historical, political and social circumstance. One of the many telenovela examples addressed in this book is whether the serial Padre Coraje constructs a parallel between the current Kirchner government and that of Juan Peron, fifty years earlier. The serial explores the two leaders' relationship with the Church and implicitly presents President Kirchner as Peron's successor. Explaining telenovelas as cultural texts (they are not soap operas) provides the primary basis for this study, backed by Argentinian newspaper articles and secondary sources on Latin American history, culture and economy, as well as TV and cinema studies. The result is a more profound and nuanced interpretation than hitherto of Argentinian telenovelas. Analysis enables identification of the links between the serials' storylines and contemporary political and social events. These popular culture texts bring new meaning to the Argentinian historical narrative, and for TV viewers puts the processes and effects of economic and social globalisation on a local multi-cultural level perspective.
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