Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination

Cambridge University Press, 8/22/2019
EAN 9781107111257, ISBN10: 1107111250

Hardcover, 396 pages, 24.8 x 17.8 x 2.5 cm
Language: English

Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound and often surprising intersections between the sciences and opera during the long nineteenth century are here explored for the first time. These touch on a wide variety of topics, including vocal physiology, theories of listening and sensory communication, technologies of theatrical machinery and discourses of biological degeneration. Taken together, the chapters reveal an intertwined cultural history that extends from backstage hydraulics to drawing-room hypnotism, and from laryngoscopy to theatrical aeronautics. Situated at the intersection of opera studies and the history of science, the book therefore offers a novel and illuminating set of case studies, of a kind that will appeal to historians of both science and opera, and of European culture more generally from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian period.

1. Introduction
the laboratory and the stage David Trippett and Benjamin Walton
Part I. Voices
2. Pneumotypes
Jean de Reszke's high pianissimos and the occult sciences of breathing James Q. Davies
3. Vocal culture in the age of laryngoscopy Benjamin Steege
4. Operatic fantasies in early nineteenth-century psychiatry Carmel Raz
5. Opera and hypnosis
Victor Maurel's experiments in suggestion with Verdi's Otello Céline Frigau Manning
Part II. Ears
6. Hearing space in the music of Hector Berlioz Julia Kursell
7. From distant sounds to Aeolian ears
Ernst Kapp's auditory prosthesis David Trippett
8. Wagner, hearing loss, and the urban soundscape of late nineteenth-century Germany James Deaville
Part III. Technologies
9. Science, technology and love in late eighteenth-century opera Deirdre Loughridge
10. Technological phantoms of the opéra Benjamin Walton
11. Circuit listening Ellen Lockhart
Part IV. Bodies
12. Excelsior as mass ornament
the reproduction of gesture Gavin Williams
13. Automata, physiology and opera Myles Jackson
14. Wagnerian manipulation
Bayreuth and the sciences of the mind James Kennaway
15. Unsound seeds Alexander Rehding.