Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu

by Edited by Victoria Johnson , Jane F. Fulcher , Thomas Ertman

• ISBN13: 9780521124201
• ISBN10: 0521124204
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-12-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

Table of Contents

Foreword Craig Calhoun

Introduction: opera and the academic turns

The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works: Introduction to Part I

Venice's mythic empires: truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

Lully's on-stage societies

Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764

Women's roles in Meyerbeer's operas: how Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera

The effect of a bomb in the hall: the French 'opera of ideas' and its cultural role in the 1920s

The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera: Introduction to Part II

State and market, production and style: an interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history

Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city

'Edizione distrutte' and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

Opera in France, 1870-1900: between nationalism and foreign imports

Fascism and the operatic unconscious

Theorizing Opera and the Social: Introduction to Part III

Opera and society (assuming a relationship)

Symbolic domination and contention in French music: shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu

Rewriting history from the losers' point of view: French grand opera and modernity

Conclusion: towards a new understanding of the history of opera?

Bibliography

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