My thesis examines the connection between scripture and contemporary American poetry. Scripture is inherently poetic, employing devices that require analysis and explication. Poets drawing from scriptural text for narrative, language, or form are not looking to replace scripture, or even enhance it. Poets create new experiences in language, and their writing can illuminate the poetics of scripture. My thesis will examine work by three contemporary poets who have imitated, alluded to, and re-created scripture: Jacqueline Osherow's "Scattered Psalms" from 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise; Louise Glück's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Wild Iris; and Morri Creech's "The Testament of Judas" from his 2001 collection Paper Cathedrals. Each of these texts investigates the metaphor "Man is like God"—a metaphor which Allen Grossman argues is the most important in Western civilization—from a unique and yet scripturally archival point of view. At the same time, each features a strong individual speaker, one of the hallmarks of contemporary poetry. Osherow identifies the speaker of her psalms as a version of herself, explicitly personalizing her poetry. Glück's speaker is isolated, and is defined as she speaks to both God and her garden but is heard by neither. Creech's Judas is concerned solely with his personal experience with and understanding of Jesus. Emphasizing the individual makes poetry a personal rather than shared experience. It becomes the individual speaker's responsibility to establish his/her relationship with God based on how they perceive God and how they represent him through language.

Operatic history is riddled with reform. Although at the discursive level all operatic reforms share similar motivations, their execution in practice yields extremely different results, each indicative of the time and place in which they occur. Despite their claims to pan-historical aesthetic truth and timeless ideals, operatic reforms are highly specific indicators of their generation's individual needs, desires, and fears. My dissertation explores what the mid-eighteenth-century reform, pioneered most famously by Gluck and Calzabigi, can tell us about opera and its composers, audiences and performers in Habsburg Vienna. I interpret both reformed and unreformed Italian opera seria in 1760s Vienna through four different but intersecting conceptual lenses: luxury and economics, political representation, theories of body and communication, and a performer's voice. Opera played an important role in a widespread debate over luxury that pervaded Western Europe, an issue that comprised not only changing economics but paradigmatic shifts in social behavior. In the field of medicine, new scientific observation began to transform the ways that people viewed emotion and communication, and the ways these were expressed in opera. The nature of sovereignty itself was slowly shifting from absolutist models, requiring both new modes of government and new operatic representation. Yet individual singer's voices, such as that of Gaetano Guadagni, still played a vital role in shaping composition and aesthetics. Vienna in the 1760s experienced a flowering of diverse approaches to the problem of opera by a network of performers and composers who blurred the lines between tradition and progress and make us rethink the meanings of reform.

Diss.--Philosophie--New York, NY--Columbia Univ., 1970. / Bibliogr. p. 234-250.

abstract: This doctoral project involves a multi-disciplined analysis concerning Agamemnon's daughters (Iphigenia, Electra, and Chrysothemis) and how these women's gender and virtues were depicted as compared with ideal Greek women in antiquity. Three composers in three different eras adapted the literary and musical depictions of these women based on the composer's society, culture, audience expectations, musical climate and personal goals. George Friedrich Handel's Oreste (1734), Christoph Willibald von Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) and Richard Strauss's Elektra (1909) are the main operas used for this analysis. The Mycenaean House of Atreus, a dynasty which the ancient Greeks traced back to the time of the Trojan War in the 12th century BCE, figures prominently in Greek mythology and ancient Greek literature concerning the Trojan War. The House of Atreus included Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and commander of the Greeks at Troy, his wife Clytaemnestra, their son Orestes, and their daughters: Iphigenia, Electra, and Chrysothemis. For over three thousand years, the legend of this ancient family has inspired musical scores, plays, poetry, architecture, sculpture, paintings, and movies. Numerous studies examine the varying interpretations of the House of Atreus myths; few, if any, address the ways in which female Greek virtues are depicted operatically within the myths. In the music of Handel's Oreste, Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and Strauss's Elektra, Agamemnon's daughters contradict the ideal Greek woman while still exhibiting heroic or idealistic virtues. The analysis of the operas in their social contexts will address the audience expectations and composers' dramatic interpretations of the myth. This analysis will include: a brief overview of ancient Greek culture and gender roles; a literary comparison of the original dramas to the librettos; societal audience expectations in their historical contexts; musical, philosophical, and literary influences on the composers; and an examination of music composed in two different centuries and in three different styles. The brief historical, cultural, literary, and musical analyses highlight the absence and presence of ancient Greek virtues, and how these women can be presented both as heroic, or virtuous, and unvirtuous in the same production. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music 2012

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The primary speaker of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris is a wanderer in her own garden. She relentlessly searches for God among her foxgloves and daisies, straining to hear God's voice. Two other speakers, God and the collective plants of the garden, offer their perspectives without acknowledgement by the human speaker. Many critics read these two other speakers as, in fact, narcissistic projections of the human speaker, a God and a world made in her own image. In this thesis, I clarify that the kind of narcissistic projection that occurs in The Wild Iris is actually productive for genuine spiritual experience and encounters with the divine, not self-deluded illusions. If these two other speakers are in fact animated by the human speaker, it is through poetry's ability to facilitate encounters with alterity. With Michel de Certeau's concept of metaphorai in mind, I argue that the speaker's eventual communion with God is particularly made possible by her use of metaphor, which allows her to linguistically traverse the distance between her and God.

Setting a very famous Metastasio's libreto Semiramide riconosciuta to music in Prague in 1752, Giovanni Marco Rutini has ranked among the best composers of his time. The aim of this thesis is to explore the process of this production coming to light: the influence of changes in the original libretto in the beginning to the impact of music later. Researching the context of the Prague theatre productions in the 1750s, we were further able to make some suggestions about the reasons of these changes/interpretations. Studying the dramaturgical level of this composition in the first place, we were using comparison and stylistic analytical methods which showed Rutini as a very creative composer with a sense of dramatical situations and a characterization skills. Key words: Giovanni Marco Rutini, Semiramide riconosciuta, Pietro Metastasio, Giovanni Battista Locatelli, Christoph Willibald Gluck, dramaturgy of opera, musical analysis

”vivid and fiery”
  Carolina Müller as phenomenon at the Royal Theatre Carolina Müller is identical with the Royal Theatre and she was the first professional female opera singer in Sweden. The audience’s perception of her stage personality and her agency in her portrayal of the title role in C. W. Gluck’s opera Alceste at the Stockholm opera in 1781 will throw light on her quality; her singing and acting style according to the affect she created on stage linked to the age of sensibility. Carolina Müller’s agency constitutes a gap in Swedish theatre history which will be examined in order to reach a better understanding of the structures behind her position. Willmar Sauter’s concept of the theatrical event, but with a feministic perspective on the role of the actress, is used to analyze her performativity, which I characterize as both passionate and sentimental. I use historical descriptive sources to understand her stage personality, and I will look into her performance of Alceste from the perspective of late eighteenth century acting. Secondly, I look into the prescriptive sources linked to Alceste, to examine how her stage personality affected the production, she had a great impact on the creation of the opera characters written for her after her Alceste. Finally, I highlight how the European exchange allowed her to emerge as a phenomenon. Telling her story is a contribution to the history of the prima donnas of the north, and thereby to the field of feminist historiography.  Carolina Müller, Gluck, Alceste, actress, Royal Theatre, phenomenon, stage personality, agency, theatrical event, performativity, sensibility, gaze