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Full-Text Articles in Musicology

Mothers Who Live: Gender Subversion And Resilience In Leoš Janáček’S Jenůfa, Megan Lynne Whiteman Aug 2017

Mothers Who Live: Gender Subversion And Resilience In Leoš Janáček’S Jenůfa, Megan Lynne Whiteman

Masters Theses

Leoš Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, which premiered in 1904, takes place in a secluded Moravian village and details the story of two women, Jenůfa and Kostelnička. They are intertwined through an act of infanticide, family dynamics, and gender expectations. Recognized as the first Czech naturalist dramatist, Gabriela Preissová wrote the Czech realist play, Její pastorkyňa [Her Stepdaughter] (1890), which provided prose for the opera. Tragedies often occur in Jenůfa due to women defying social norms and the problems that arise as a result of their actions. The gender transgressions of Jenůfa and Kostelnička—actions that deviate from gender expectations …


Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, And Anxiety In Parsifal, Tyler Cole Mitchell Aug 2014

Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, And Anxiety In Parsifal, Tyler Cole Mitchell

Masters Theses

Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered …