Mad Loves (ebook)

Argumento de Mad Loves (ebook)

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera 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. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from 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.

Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opéra-comiques. Hadlock investigates 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, she considers 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.

"While Hadlock's reading of Hoffman against its sources affords many keen insights, her reading of the opera against itself is even more revealing . . . A work of scintillating intelligence and endlessly intriguing possibilities."--M. Lignana Rosenberg, Opera News

"Mad Loves offers us a prolonged meditation on Offenbach's final masterpiece, one in which we are often reminded, both elegantly and persuasively, of the diversity of cultural messages an opera can carry. This is one of the most impressive examples of operatic criticism to have appeared in the past decade, and a book that will definitely appeal to a broad range of opera enthusiasts."--Roger Parker, St. John's College, Cambridge

"Heather Hadlock has produced a charming book on one of the central operas of the standard repertory. Mad Loves engages with the pleasures afforded by Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, that is, it does not ignore the basis for the piece's popularity in an attempt at salvaging it for the sake of formalist music theory. Yet it also interrogates key aspects of the opera in ways that open it up to serious cultural criticism. The book should attract, stimulate, and delight both scholars from across the humanities and the many opera enthusiasts who love to read about their favorite works."--Susan McClary, University of California, Los Angeles0Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Chapter One Telling the Tales 17
Chapter Two Mesmerizing Voices: Music, Medicine, and the Invention of Dr. Miracle 42
Chapter Three Song as Symptom: Antonia, Olympia, and the Prima Donna Mother 67
Chapter Four Offenbach, for Posterity 86
Chapter Five Reflections on the Venetian Act 113
Notes 135
Bibliographgy 149
Index 161