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Saturday, January 24, 2015

Mad loves: eroticism and music in Offenbach, I racconti di Hoffmann

Speranza

Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes D'Hoffmann

Front Cover
 
In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the Offenbach's career but also a century of Romantic culture.

A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, "I racconti di Hoffmann" unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist.

These episodes comprise a collective unconscious, that involves the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject.

I racconti di Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opéra-comiques, considering the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work.

Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, we have to consider how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

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