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Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (California Studies in 19th Century Music) by Mary Ann Smart is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner'the most enthusiastic mimomaniac'ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. Mary Ann Smart suspects that Nietzsche may have seen and heard more than he realized. In Mimomania she takes his accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. As Smart demonstrates, this productive fusion of music and movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Verdi baritone. Mimomania tracks such effects through readings of operas by Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner.Listening for gestural music, we find resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the

Who reads Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (California Studies in 19th Century Music)?

Author

Mary Ann Smart

Publisher

University of California Press

Published

2004

Language

EN

ISBN

9786612358548

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Education, History, Music

Rating

4.67 / 5 (1 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13