Description
A monumental undertaking that has been assembled with exquisite care. This collection coheres beautifully and reveals new aspects of the connection between opera and modernism. Utterly stimulating. -- Adrian Daub, Stanford University, author of Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner Opera - the endlessly "dying" form - and modernism - the endlessly emerging shape of things to come: Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith bring us up to date with rich and ambitious readings of works from Wagner to Saariaho, demonstrating that if modernism is a storm, opera may be its ear. -- William Germano, Cooper Union, author of The Tales of Hoffmann Modernism and Opera is a book that had to be written. Its brilliant chapters about music-theater works from Wagner to Saariaho illuminate how opera's extravagance, theatricality, and intermediality are the often overlooked foundations and companions to our received ideas about Modernist art, collaboration, and style. -- Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University This is a fantastic volume, brimming with nuanced reformulations of operatic modernisms. The quality of the essays never wavers. A must-read for those interested not only in the links between modernism and music but also in the very notion of interdisciplinarity, which here is given a new lease of life. -- Nathan Waddell, University of Nottingham
About the Author
Richard Begam is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity and the coeditor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939. Matthew Wilson Smith is an associate professor of German studies and theater and performance studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace and the editor of Georg Buchner: The Major Works.
Reviews
The often-vexed societal reception of modernism and opera is foreboding testimony to the necessity for this book, which is the first collection of its kind... Essential. Choice
Book Information
ISBN 9781421420622
Author Richard Begam
Format Hardback
Page Count 392
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 658g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 30mm