eBook

Vocal Apparitions

Michal Grover-Friedlander

2014

Overview

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways.Vocal Apparitionstells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film,The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers'A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's playThe Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers'A Nightat the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera,Vocal Apparitionsreveals something original and important about each medium.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Absolute music / Anna Magnani / Apparitions (TV series) / Bel canto / Callas Forever / Carlotta (The Phantom of the Opera) / Carolyn Abbate / Castrato / Charles Gounod / Coloratura / Comic opera / Courtly love / Cremation / Death Song / Der Rosenkavalier / Di quella pira / Don Giovanni / Echo and Narcissus / Falsetto / Film & Video / Film score / Film Studies / Francis Poulenc / Franco Zeffirelli / French New Wave / Genres & Styles / Giuseppe Verdi / History & Criticism / Il trovatore / Jean Cocteau / L'Orfeo / La nave / La Scala / La traviata / La voix humaine / Leitmotif / Libretto / Love and Death / Luchino Visconti / Lucia di Lammermoor / Marguerite (musical) / Maria Callas / Melodrama / Motion pictures and opera / MUSIC / MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera / Music Is / Narrative / Notion (software) / Opera / Otello / Otello (Rossini) / Parody / Parsifal / PERFORMING ARTS / PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / General / PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism / Philosophy and aesthetics / Predicament / Richard Wagner / Rigoletto / Roberto Rossellini / Roderigo / Romanticism / Silent film / Singing / Soliloquy / Sound effect / Sound of Water / Source music / Stretto / The Birth of Tragedy / The Human Voice / The Magic Flute / The Merry Wives of Windsor / Two Women / Unsung (TV series) / Ventriloquism / Vincenzo Bellini / Vocal music / Voice in motion pictures / Wagnerism / Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (musical)
• ISBN: 9781400866748, 140086674X, 9780691120089, 0691120080