Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Moctezuma Entre Bambalinas, Isabel Bargalló, Montserrat Bargalló

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

Resumen: De los muchos personajes históricos y míticos que ha aportado América a la cultura, uno de los más conocidos y – al mismo tiempo – desconocidos es Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, el tlatoani reinante en México-Tenochtitlan a la llegada de Cortés, y es, sin duda alguna, un héroe tan digno de la lírica como Ulises, Eneas o Julio César. Por este motivo, durante el siglo xviii se compusieron un número muy importante de óperas dedicadas al soberano mexica, para un público algo cansado de los libretos relacionados con la mitología grecorromana y los dramas medievales. En este artículo presentamos una de …

Historical Figures And Events As Portrayed Through Opera And Art Song, Emanuel Stavrinakis

Senior Theses

In this thesis essay, an inspection of classical vocal music spanning centuries will identify works based on real-life historical figures and events. The range of works to be inspected span from the Late Renaissance to the Modern era of classical composition. From the early days of vocal composition composers looked back into the past to draw inspiration for their desired expression and portrayal of human conflict. However, in many cases the figures or historical facts portrayed differ quite significantly from how they were in real life.

Composers and librettists, the authors of the text being set to music, had a …

Covid-19_Umaine News_For Umaine Opera Workshop, The Show Goes On, University Of Maine Division Of Marketing And Communications

Division of Marketing & Communications

Screenshot of UMaine News press release regarding the University of Maine School of Performing Arts Opera Workshop going online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table Of Contents], Roger Mathew Grant

Philosophy & Theory

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to …

Guide To The William A. Brown Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

William A. Brown was a founding member of the Center for Black Music Repertory Ensemble and a Distinguished Professor of Voice at the University of North Florida. He was a tenor and a recitalist and his collection includes concert programs, promotional materials, photographs, correspondence, and media chronicling his career.

Guide To The Theodore Charles Stone Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

Theodore Charles Stone was a Chicago-based opera singer and journalist who served as president of both the National Association of Negro Musicians and Chicago Music Association. The collection provides insight into the African American operatic music scene throughout the 20th century.

Guide To The Zenobia Powell Perry Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

Zenobia Powell Perry was a professor, pianist, and composer of classical music. The collection is comprised entirely of Perry’s unpublished scores and music manuscripts, and the collection was arranged by her biographer, Jeannie Gayle Pool.

Freemasons: Patrons Of The Enlightenment Arts, Jacob Money

Honors Projects

The Enlightenment is known as a time of great advances in science, political theory and individual rights. What is often not given proper consideration are the advances made in the fine arts. Out of this time period came the Hudson River Valley School of painting, a return to Greco-Roman architecture, and the explosion in popularity of the performing arts. In each of these cases, the historically secretive organization known as the Freemasons had a role in the patronage of these artists, architects and composers. Most people are aware of the Masons through popular media and although countless conspiracy theories surround …

Freemasons: Patrons Of The Enlightenment Arts, Jacob Money

Honors Projects

The Enlightenment is known as a time of great advances in science, political theory and individual rights. What is often not given proper consideration are the advances made in the fine arts. Out of this time period came the Hudson River Valley School of painting, a return to Greco-Roman architecture, and the explosion in popularity of the performing arts. In each of these cases, the historically secretive organization known as the Freemasons had a role in the patronage of these artists, architects and composers. Most people are aware of the Masons through popular media and although countless conspiracy theories surround …

Scandalous By Profession: Opera In Eighteenth-Century Europe, Felicity Moran

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

Opera, as one of the most important art forms of the eighteenth century, bequeathed to its singers a strong position of prestige. And yet, a stigma of social disreputability hung over these same performers. This article examines that paradox first by looking at the importance of opera in the cultural centers of Naples, Paris, and London. From this foundation follows a closer study of the origins of stage performers, and from there, an examination of the on and off-stage behavior of opera singers in the eighteenth century that contributed to the negative image they projected onto society. Finally, the article …

Wagner In The "Cult Of Art In Nazi Germany", David B. Dennis

David B. Dennis

No abstract provided.

Crying ‘Wolf’? A Review Essay On Recent Wagner Literature, David B. Dennis

David B. Dennis

No abstract provided.

Their Meister's Voice: Nazi Reception Of Richard Wagner And His Works In The Völkischer Beobachter, David B. Dennis

David B. Dennis

A detailed examination of Richard Wagner's reception in Nazi Germany.

Opera And Its Voices In Utah, Walter B. Rudolph

Arrington Annual Lecture

The annual lecture honors Arrington, whose papers were donated to Utah State University’s Special Collections and Archives, a division in USU’s University Libraries. Part of the gift agreement was to offer an annual lecture on some facet of Mormon history.

“Opera initially did not cross the plains with the Mormon pioneers, nor did classical music,” Rudolph said. “But singing was a very important part of the pioneer heritage and everyday lives.”

Rudolph earned a bachelor’s in music and a master’s in musicology from Brigham Young University. He started a career in performance and teaching in the mid-1970s before turning to …

“Ain’T It A Pretty Night?”: An Analysis Of Carlisle Floyd’S Susannah As An Allegory For The Socio-Political Culture Of The United States In The 1950s, Melissa L. Allen

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This capstone thesis discusses the applicability of Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 opera, Susannah, as an allegory for the socio-political climate of the United States in the 1950s. In order to do so, a musical analysis of the opera’s score was then performed for its use of folk song conventions and verismo operatic conventions. The libretto was analyzed for the use of social conventions of Southern Appalachia. Characters actions and musical content were then judged on whether (1) their actions were in line with the social conventions of traditional Appalachian culture and (2) if their musical content used/reflected conventions of traditional Appalachian …

Finding Music’S Words: Moses Und Aron And Viennese Jewish Modernism, Maurice E. Cohn

Honors Papers

This thesis attempts to understand Schoenberg and his opera Moses und Aron as important participants within the philosophical debates of their time, but also to understand that participation as necessarily musical—his music is analogous to, rather than representative of, the surrounding philosophy of his era. The first chapter addresses the broader relevant trends in Jewish philosophy, coming to focus specifically on parallels between Schoenberg and the philosopher Franz Rosenzsweig. It does not attempt to understand Schoenberg as a Jewish philosopher per se. Rather, it explores the ways in which the problems facing Jewish philosophers of Schoenberg’s generation—namely, debates about the …

Minor Myers Iii, Minor Myers Iii, Meg Miner

All oral histories

Minor Myers III recalls several experiences with his father's collecting interests and how his father used Minor III's desire to acquire baseball cards to teach him about collecting. His childhood interest in treasures led his father to bury a box of Roman coins in the backyard for him to discover. He makes several observations about his father's intellectual curiosity and the ways his collections both informed and fueled what Minor III describes as a "consumptive joy." He reflects on his father's love of music and the structure and purpose of his father's organization of knowledge.

Their Meister's Voice: Nazi Reception Of Richard Wagner And His Works In The Völkischer Beobachter, David B. Dennis

History: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A detailed examination of Richard Wagner's reception in Nazi Germany.

Berlin Opera Wars : Institutional And The Quest For German Identity, Rebecca Robinson

Honors Theses

In October 2000, Berlin’s Minister of Culture Christoph Stölzl proposed a merger of the city’s opera houses. In the midst of German reunification, Berlin was struggling financially and the cost of three separate opera houses was too much for the city to bear. This proposal to combine the former East-German Staatsoper Berlin and Komishe Oper with the former West-German Deutsche Oper under the administration of “The Opera Stages of Berlin” was met with public backlash. Newspapers all over the world reported daily as the directors of both the Staatsoper and Deutsche Oper—Daniel Barenboim and Christian Thielemans— fought bitterly for their …

Wagner Contra Mundum: Wagner Versus The World, Caitlin A. Thom

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

An investigation of responses to Wagner in Nazi Germany and post-World War II Israel.

Center Stage: Operatic Culture And Nation Building In Nineteenth-Century Central Europe, Philipp Ther

Central European Studies

Grand palaces of culture, opera theaters marked the center of European cities like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. As opera cast its spell, almost every European city and society aspired to have its own opera house, and dozens of new theaters were constructed in the course of the "long" nineteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, only a few, mostly royal, opera theaters, existed in Europe. However, by the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly every large town possessed a theater in which operas were performed, especially in Central Europe, the region upon …

French Opera And The French Revolution, Etienne Nicolas Mehul, Savannah J. Dotson

Departmental Honors Projects

Although Etienne Nicolas Méhul is relatively unknown today, he was greatly respected by his contemporaries, including Beethoven, Cherubini and Berlioz. He rose to popularity and notoriety during the most turbulent years of the French Revolution, when most intellectuals fled for their lives, and yet he managed to maintain his status as a favorite of the people. From an examination of some of his operas - Euphrosine (1790), Ariodant (1799), Adrien (1792, 1799), and Horatius Coclès (1794) - it is apparent that Mehul used thinly veiled allegories to express his views. His heroes in these operas were Romans, Scottish nobles, and …

Wagner In The "Cult Of Art In Nazi Germany", David B. Dennis

History: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Hassman, Drusilla (Hand), 1875-1971 (Mss 413), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 413. Chiefly courtship letters addressed to Drusilla (Hand) Hassman, Evansville, Indiana from various male admirers. Also correspondence with her husband, Fred Hassman, and letters sent to them as a married couple from friends and family.

Strahm, Franz Joseph, 1867-1941 (Sc 474), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 474. Postcard and letter written by Franz Joseph Strahm, while on a visit to Germany, to Walter Pearce, Bowling Green, Kentucky. The picture post card is of Strahm’s birthplace, and the letter concerns opera in Germany. Includes two cards of Pearce showing the grades he received in Strahm’s music classes at Western Kentucky State Teachers College, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

0786: James B. Justice Collection, 2009-2011, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

This collection consists of two black boxes, each with the same content. Each box contains manuscript pages for various creative endeavors by James B. Justice and others, including poetry, an opera, and visual arts, as well as a CD containing the music for the opera. Selected works include a book called Idle Moments and an opera The Old Shoe Blues. A full list of the contents of the box, as typed by the author, can be found in the container list section of the finding aid.

The Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s.

Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the …

Temple Collection (Mss 55), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 55. Correspondence, 1931-1970 (33 items), chiefly of William Montgomery Temple, originally of Bowling Green, Kentucky, an autograph collector; his collection of papers of Kentucky governors, 1805-1951 (50); other autograph letters, 1715-1941 (17); and articles about Bowling Green, etc., (23).

Northcott Collection (Mss 40), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 40. Fifty-three diaries (1859-1918) and other writings of Henry Clay Northcott, 1822-1918, Methodist circuit preacher and farmer of northern Kentucky; correspondence (1870-1883) of his daughter, music teacher Kate N. Thomas, 1850-1889; and her husband, Bruce F. Thomas, 1853?-1882, lawyer of Vanceburg, Kentucky.

Album De Louis Delaquerrière (1856-1937) Ténor À L’Opéra-Comique De Paris, Professeur De Chant : Survol / Overview, Liliane Delaquerrière Richardson

Louis Achille Delaquerrière Album

Louis Achille Delaquerrière (1856-1937) was a tenor at the Opéra-Comique, Paris. Born in Normandy, he attended the Petit Séminaire de Rouen - where he obtained his Baccalauréat ès Lettres - and was a choir boy in the Maîtrise de la cathédrale de Rouen. His vocal teachers included Louise de Miramont and Jean-Baptiste Faure. He married his teacher, soprano Louise de Miramont (1845-1911) in 1880.

Delaquerrière’s stage career began at the Opéra-Comique in Le Chalet (1881); his roles included: ‘Almaviva’ - Barber of Seville, ‘Don José’ - Carmen; he also appeared in Mignon (A. Thomas), La Dame Blanche …