Opera and the culture of fascism / Jeremy Tambling.
Author/creator |
Tambling, Jeremy |
Format | Book and Print |
Publication Info | Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996. |
Description | 274 pages ; 25 cm |
Subject(s) |
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Contents | Introduction: Opera and the culture of fascism -- Part I. Opera beyond good and evil. The sorrows of Richard Wagner -- Part II. The modernization of Italian opera. Verdi and umperialism: Otello -- The laughter of Falstaff: comedy and Italian politics -- Puccini and the swish of Tosca's skirts -- From Madama Butterfly to Turandot: the crowd and the gamble -- Part III. Opera, gender, and degeneracy. Daughters of Kundry: Salome and Elektra -- Conducting from the right: Strauss, Kitsch, and Nihilism -- 'Entartete Musik': reading the Nazis and the Schreker case -- Post-opera? After Brecht. |
Abstract | This study looks at nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary 'high' art-form altogether. the author highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a critical re-reading of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others. He draws on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author also uses the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics. Resisting the cliches about Wagner's or Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich, the author takes opera out of the hermetically sealed state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it as both complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the 'culture of fascism', and those that tried to make opera part of the 'fascism of culture'. |
Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-267) and index. |
LCCN | 96013317 |
ISBN | 0198165668 |
Available Items
Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions | |
Music | Music Stacks | ML1720 .T36 1996 | ✔ Available | Place Hold |