Bodily Charm: Living Opera
Positioning itself within the debates on “body criticism” from the 1990s and the more recent work on opera as performance, this book is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art, not intended to be mediated by technology. Written by a literary theorist and a physician, it is an interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented, dramatized bodies of stage in such operas as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra. Opera, it argues, is an exuberantly embodied dramatic art form, Dionysian in its performative and corporeal excess.
Table of Contents
Before We Begin . . .
An Introductory Note on the Operatic Body in Context
Prelude
Restoring Opera's Bodies
Act I: Represented Bodies
The Body Beautiful
The Body Dangerous
Act II: Real Bodies
The Performing Body
The Perceiving Body
Postlude
A Toast to Opera's Bodies