Diss.--Zürich--Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 189-196.

Th. Etat--Musicologie--Saint-Etienne--Saint-Etienne-Jean Monnet, 2002. / Catalogue des oeuvres de G. Donizetti p. 508-545. Bibliogr., discogr. et videogr. p. 428-467. Index.

Inaug.-diss-Basel. / Lebenslauf. "Literatur": p. 91-92. "Verzeichnis der werke Pugnanis mit Nachweis der Neudrucke": p. 93-106.

Freie Univ., Diss.--Berlin, 2003. / Cont. bibl. (p. 307-325), name index and notes. Revised thesis.

This creative project is the design and construction of costumes for the opera "Don Pasquale" using flat pattern, draping and fitting methods. This creative project enabled the author to gain an understanding of the methods and skills of the craft of costume construction with emphesis on short cuts for rapid construction and methods for making changes in costumes for future use.This project also involved a thorough study of the 18th century period costumes and textiles and the planning of each costume in relationship to the stage setting and lighting.

The 19th-century fascination with madness led to a theatrical phenomenon most palpably represented in the operatic mad scene, where the insane heroine expresses her madness in an aria of ‘phenomenal difficulty’ (Ashley 2002). This research explores the representation of female madness as power in the mad scenes of two famously mad opera characters: Lucia from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Ophélie from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (1868). The objective is to investigate the representation of female madness in the libretti, the musical scores and in visual performances, in order to challenge the notion of female madness as weakness. The research was conducted using a qualitative research paradigm. The study explored the depiction of female madness in various fields of artistic representation, and the concept of power and female power in literature, resulting in the novel interpretation of these enigmatic mad scenes. This was a hermeneutic study considered within an interpretive paradigm. The research was conducted in three stages: a literature review, a full score analysis and a visual performance analysis. The results show that the 19th-century gendered paradigm shift of madness to an overtly female disorder, led to various artistic interpretations of the madwoman, most notably in art, literature, theatre and opera. Opera proved to be the ultimate platform for the musical depiction of female madness, particularly due to the virtuosic vocal capacity of the coloratura soprano. In spite of social and political advancement, women were portrayed as weak in operatic plots. It was established that a delicate balance exists between power and powerlessness in the operatic mad scene. Both Lucia and Ophélie are women trapped in a patriarchal environment, and the onset of their madness is traditionally attributed to the weak default of their gender and their inability to process dramatic emotional events. However, the composers’ musical realisation of madness, as well as the embodied performance of both characters by the soloists, accentuates the interplay between madness as weakness and, most importantly, madness as empowerment. The study shows that the powerlessness associated with female madness is paradoxically reversed by the very factors that denote female madness in the operatic mad scene, namely gender and vocal virtuosity. Numerous musical and visual performance elements employed by composers and directors, notably depicting the madwoman as feeble, point to the empowerment of the seemingly ‘weak’ soprano. Musical elements used to portray madness include deconstruction, orchestration and high pitch. The study revealed additional musical elements, such as the inclusion of themes from previous acts of the opera, the use of specific instrumentation and a capella passages for soprano. The study argues that the characteristics that define female madness in music, namely gender and vocal excess, specifically contribute to the representation of madness as power. Elaborate coloratura vocal passages and scant orchestration are the two musical elements used by Donizetti and Thomas to assist in the depiction of female madness as power in the operatic mad scene. Consequently the study establishes that the extravagant vocal virtuosity displayed by the coloratura soprano casts the madwoman as powerful in the operatic mad scene. / Mini Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Music / Unrestricted

This dissertation investigates the evolving notions of verisimilitude and pictorial objectivity in eighteenth-century France through wax-based objects. I identify three case studies and examine the truth claims that were made about them: polychrome wax sculpture by Antoine Benoist (1632-1717) and Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (c.1656-1701) at the turn of the century; an attempt by the Comte de Caylus (1692-1765) to resurrect ancient encaustic painting in the early 1750s; anatomical models by Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799) and André Pierre Pinson (1746- 1828) during the latter decades of the century. In all cases, wax objects and associated truth claims addressed specific domains of specialized knowledge and practice. Benoist and Zumbo’s sculpture took part of period debates about pictorial verisimilitude, while Caylus proposed encaustic painting as an alternative method of accessing historical past. By contrast, Fragonard and Pinson’s work challenged the evidentiary and pedagogical value of anatomical models. My dissertation identifies potential origins of modern dependency on, as well as skepticism towards, what counts as reliable or legitimate visual information. By addressing objects and their makers that have not received substantial scholarly attention, I demonstrate how they resisted increasingly rigid Enlightenment categories, even when their ostensible purposes were in line with the broader Enlightenment project. By extension, my project offers an opportunity to think more broadly about the viability of a medium as a conduit of information, whether in the rise of photography in the nineteenth century or in today’s debates about post-truth politics.

No description available.

The works published by Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) between 1878 and 1889 exposed Italian culture to the most innovative European literary trend, French Naturalism, and marked a turning point in the landscape of Italian literature. While Verga’s stylistic choices are meant to create, in his own words, ‘the complete illusion of reality’ (having the author disappear from the text in order to make way for a supposedly unmediated representation), I argue that Verga’s Verist fiction ends up emphasizing precisely the ways in which people represent reality according to their own relative point of view. Since the narrative is given from the unreliable perspective of the characters, all the distortions inherent in every storytelling act become apparent. Their viewpoint is purposefully shown as being partial and informed by individual interests, feelings, and desires. These complex dynamics of representation, or misrepresentation, in Verga’s Verist production are at the heart of my enquiry. This critical focus allows me to reevaluate the traditional representation of Verism and Naturalism as backward-looking phenomena, firmly tied to a notion of art as a mirror up to nature. The present study is situated within a growing body of work (inaugurated by Luperini, Pellini, and Merola) that intends to re-frame Verga as having demonstrably paved the way for twentieth-century Modernism. The first chapter interrogates the way in which space is transfigured by characters in I Malavoglia (1881). By looking at how narratives of country vs city, past vs present are formed and shaped by the characters’ relative points of view, I argue that the novel should be read not simply as the account of the modernization of a rural village in post-unification Italy, but mainly as a study into how such oppositional narratives are formed and what aims they serve. The second chapter focuses on a specific character-type, the malevolent observer. I argue that this figure can be seen as a representation of the readers in the texts and that it is instrumental in exemplifying Verga’s skepticism toward the heuristic potential of literature. The third chapter examines the gap between reality and representation as articulated in Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) by situating Verga in a completely new intellectual framework, that of elite theory as formulated by political theorist Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). This move allows me to re-read what has become a commonplace of Verga criticism – the theatrical conception of politics in Mastro-don Gesualdo as a bitter commentary on trasformismo – as a much wider point on social history, human nature, and on the inherently slippery essence of language, on its built-in capacity to deceive and dissimulate.

Master of Music / Department of Music / Frank C. Tracz / This document was submitted to the Graduate School of Kansas State University as a partial requirement for the Master’s of Music Education degree. It contains information about music education philosophy, what defines quality literature, theoretical and historical analyses, and rehearsal plans for each of the three pieces that were performed on the Graduate Student Conducting Recital on Wednesday, March 11, 2009. Selections performed on the recital included in the document’s analysis portion include Four Scottish Dances by Malcolm Arnold, arranged by John Paynter, Mosaic, Op. 30 by Mario Gaetano, and Celebration Fanfare from “Stepping Stones” by Joan Tower, arranged by Jack Stamp. The analytical methods employed in this document and the rehearsal techniques listed are based on the Blocker/Miles unit studies and macro-micro-macro concepts from the Teaching Music Through Performance in Band book series.