Description
Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. This book addresses how music, the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter.
Trade Review"Richard Leppert’s book is a tour de force that marries the cultural history of opera and film with the technological history of modern media and sound technology in order to tackle fundamental questions about art in the age of modernity and our relationship to it." * Music & Letters *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Musical Examples Acknowledgments Introduction PART I. MODERNITY AND OPERA; NATURE AND REDEMPTION 1. The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West 2. Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo PART II. VOICING SUBJECTIVITY EXCURSUS: OPERA, MONUMENTALITY, AND LOOKING AT LOOKING 3. Caruso, Phonography, and Operatic Fidelities: Regimes of Musical Listening, 1904--1929 4. Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche: Three Operas, Two Notes, and One Ending at the Boundary of the Great Divide PART III. MODERNITY, NATURE, AND DYSTOPIA EXCURSUS: NATURAL BEAUTY / ART BEAUTY 5. Sound, Subjectivity, and Death: Days of Heaven (promesse du bonheur) Conclusion: Acoustic Invocations of Crisis and Hope Appendix: Chapter 5 Tables Notes Bibliography Index
