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Spectacles of Sensational Science: Locating the "Real" Bodies of Verismo Opera 1880-1926.

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	Spectacles of Sensational Science: Locating the "Real" Bodies of Verismo Opera 1880-1926./
作者:	Sylvester, Jane.
出版者:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2021,
面頁冊數:	332 p.
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-10, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-10A.
標題:	Music. -
電子資源:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28415238
ISBN:	9798708748836

Spectacles of Sensational Science: Locating the "Real" Bodies of Verismo Opera 1880-1926.
Sylvester, Jane.

Spectacles of Sensational Science: Locating the "Real" Bodies of Verismo Opera 1880-1926. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2021 - 332 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-10, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rochester, 2021.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

How did opera, Italy's national art form, crystallize the intellectual and cultural reforms of the post-Unification era? Examining this question through the lens of the positivist movement in Italy, I articulate the ways that scientific practices from the 1880s through the mid-1920s informed new modes of gender and affective expression in Italian realist (verismo) opera. After Unification was completed, many Italians began to fear that their country was in an age of degeneracy due to the continual increase of crime, poverty, and violence that plagued much of the nation. Because of this, an overwhelming sense of cultural superficiality and marginalization affected Italians. To date, few scholars have considered the relationship between late nineteenth-century histories of science and concurrent Italian operatic practices. Cultural historians have largely dismissed operatic responses to these anxieties, relying on the voices of Italian educational reformers in the 1860s and 1870s that dismissed opera as a bourgeois genre that would fail to cultivate virtue in the Italian populace. While musicologists have focused on staging developments as well as novel listening technologies in late nineteenth-century Italian opera, they mostly center on characteristics that point towards musical modernism, rather than assessing various features of the genre in its own time and place.In the 1880s, a number of positivist scientists became influential among other intellectuals, artists, and the public. This group of scientists, led by Cesare Lombroso, rejected metaphysics in favor of empiricism; they believed that social phenomena must be studied through rational logic and sensation. To solve the perceived problem of Italy's cultural degeneracy, the school of positivists looked to the bodies rather than the morals of the populace. Through their investments in criminology, hypnotism, psychology, forensics, and even spiritualism, they sought the objective roots of the nation's cultural vices. Amidst this climate of recognized intellectual change and experimentalism, however, scholars have yet to inquire about how Italian opera was impacted by these shifts, and moreover, how the art form's own relationship to nation-building developed from the 1880s onward.Outlining European histories of spiritualism, hypnotism, criminology, and forensics, this study shows not only how verismo opera was indebted to these discourses, but through my focus on bodies within opera of this time, I furthermore articulate how scientific ideologies gave way for the genre to critique social deviance, qualify autonomy for Italian audiences, and formulate "objective" gender prototypes. Examining operas by Puccini, Leoncavallo, Giordano, and Mascagni alongside scientific treatises and archival sources, I contend that science and music worked together to provide a significant, affective means of defining the bodies of Italy's diverse citizens, and thus proved a powerful nation-building force in the decades following Unification. I argue that positivist discourses not only influenced the development of operatic verismo around the turn of the twentieth century but ultimately-by prioritizing the positivist value of objectivity and the "realities" of Italians over subjective, idealistic expression-this synthesis of scientific and musical practices undermined the aesthetic values that Italian opera was built upon, contributing to its eventual compositional demise.

ISBN: 9798708748836Subjects--Topical Terms:

516178
Music.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Italy

Spectacles of Sensational Science: Locating the "Real" Bodies of Verismo Opera 1880-1926.
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