Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera

Gary Tomlinson

Princeton University Press, 21 feb. 1999 - 192 pagina's

In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes.


Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.

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Metaphysical song: an essay on opera

Gebruikersrecensie  - Not Available - Book Verdict

As Tomlinson (humanities, Univ. of Pennsylvania) states in his preface, This is not a history of opera. Although the seven chapters are organized roughly along historical lines from late Renaissance ...

Metaphysical song: an essay on opera

Gebruikersrecensie  - Not Available - Book Verdict

As Tomlinson (humanities, Univ. of Pennsylvania) states in his preface, This is not a history of opera. Although the seven chapters are organized roughly along historical lines from late Renaissance ...

Inhoudsopgave

• Voices of the Invisible: 5
• Late Renaissance Opera: 11
• A Cosmos of Apollinian Harmony: 30
• Early Modern Opera: 36
• The Borders of Theatrical Space: 70
• Modern Opera: 75
• Noumenal Themes: 106
• Composing Schopenhauer: 109
• Overcoming Operatic Metaphysics: 111
• Ghosts in the Machine: 129
• Mechanical Reproduction of Opera: 145
• Film Fantasy Endgame of Wagnerism: 147
• The Sum of Modernity: 149
• NOTES: 159
• INDEX: 183

Over de auteur

Gary Tomlinson is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and has held Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. His books include Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance and Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others.

Bibliografische gegevens

• Titel: Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; Princeton Studies in Opera
• Auteur: Gary Tomlinson
• Editie: geïllustreerd
• Uitgever: Princeton University Press, 1999
• ISBN: 0691004099, 9780691004099
• Lengte: 192 pagina's