Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107529026 ISBN 13: 9781107529021

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

David Trippett is University Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. His first monograph, Wagner's Melodies (Cambridge, 2013), examines the cultural and scientific history of melodic theory in relation to Wagner's writings and music. He recently co-edited the Companion to Music in Digital Culture (Cambridge, forthcoming) and produced a critical reconstruction of Liszt's opera, Sardanapalo for the Neue Liszt Ausgabe, which he orchestrated for Schott.

Benjamin Walton is University Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College. His monograph, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge) was published in 2007, and a collection of essays entitled The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (2013) was co-edited with Nicholas Mathew. From 2014–18 he was co-editor of Cambridge Opera Journal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107529026
• ISBN 13: 9781107529021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 398
• Editor: Trippett David