Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Quantum Books)
by Peter Conrad
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"Peter Conrad takes issue with Wagner's well-known rule that opera ought to become music-drama. He argues that other literary forms--epic, romance, allegory, the novel--and art forms which have passed beyond words, like painting and the dance, are equally crucial to the development of opera. Romantic opera in particular shifts from the activism of drama towards the introversion of the novel, until eventually opera finds its formal culmination in renouncing all dramatic externality and show more turning into its apparent opposite, the symphonic poem. Mr. Conrad's argument draws on a number of unusual sources--among them Berlioz's Shakespearean monodrama Lélio, Goethe's continuation and Auden's translation of Die Zauberflote, and Hofmannsthal's revision of Die Frau ohne Schatten as a novel--and recovers the operatic criticism of a distinguished group of writers, including Heine, Schopenhauer, Shaw, Arthur Symons, D'Annunzio, Hofmannsthal, and Auden. Romantic Opera and Literary Form is not only a welcome addition to the small number of stimulating books about opera; it also has important implications for literary history, approaching romantic culture from an original and unexpected angle."--Dust jacket. show lessTags
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29+ Works 1,091 Members
Peter Conrad was born in Australia, and since 1973 has taught English at Christ Church, Oxford
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