Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination © 2019 by Cambridge University Press

La editorial Cambridge University Press ha publicado la versión en rústica de Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (2019), coordinada por David Tippett y Benjamin Walton, profesores de la Universidad de Cambridge. Tippett, ganador de los Einstein and Lockwood Prizes y del Netl Prize, es autor de Wagner's Melodies (2013), editor de la ópera Sardanapalo (2019) de Franz Liszt y coeditor de The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (2019). Walton, coeditor de la revista académica Cambridge Opera Journal,  es autor de Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (2007) y coeditor de The invention of Beethoven and Rossini (2013).

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination es un volumen de 398 páginas (ISBN 978-1107529021) disponible en los formatos Hardback, Paperback y Kindle (precios recomendados 109,24 €, 29,12 € y 16,02 €).

Reproducimos a continuación la descripción del volumen facilitada por Cambridge University Press

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.

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination se abre con The Laboratory and the Stage, la Introducción de Tippett y Walton a la monografía colectiva que incluye ejemplos musicales, ilustraciones, tablas, bibliografía índices analíticos y catorce artículos agrupados en cuatro secciones: 

1. Voices. James Q. Davies, Pneumotypespp: Jean de Reszke’s High Pianissimos and the Occult Sciences of Breathing; Benjamin Steege, Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy; Carmel Raz, Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry; y Céline Frigau Manning, Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments in Suggestion with Verdi’s Otello.

2. Ears. Julia Kursell, Hearing in the Music of Hector Berlioz; David Trippett, From Distant Sounds to Aeolian Ears. Ernst Kapp’s Auditory Prosthesis; y James Deaville, Wagner, Hearing Loss and the Urban Soundscape of Late Nineteenth-Century Germany.

3. Technologies. Deirdre Loughridge, Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera; Benjamin Walton, Technological Phantoms of the Opéra; y Ellen Lockhart, Circuit Listening.

4. Bodies. Gavin Williams, Excelsior as Mass Ornament. The Reproduction of Gesture; Myles W. Jackson, Automata, Physiology and Opera in the Nineteenth Century; James Kennaway, Wagnerian Manipulation: Bayreuth and Nineteenth-Century Sciences of the Mind; y Alexander Rehding, Unsound Seeds.