Metamorphosis and Animation

IF 0.4 2区 艺术学 0 MUSIC JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH Pub Date : 2021-07-03 DOI:10.1080/01411896.2021.1949312
E. Lockhart
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Abstract

For those of us who think about musical genres of eighteenth-century theater —opera, festa teatrale, melodrama, pantomime—Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a consistent ambivalent presence: an unimaginably rich font of ancient stories and characters, but one that, by and large, was drawn on for works appearing outside the mainstream. An obvious exception must immediately be made for the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, which has supplied a mythology for opera’s origins as well as its expressive power. Yet this story is an oddity within Ovid’s poem, involving no metamorphosis save death and dismemberment, and possessed of an unusually detailed narrative structure and affective trajectory. What is more, there were so many Orpheus dramas within opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that to craft an Orfeo or an Orphée for the opera house was to engage with this theatrical intertext far more than with the imaginative world of the Metamorphoses. For the most part, Ovid’s volume of stories about bodily transformation was a second-tier source for serious drama, lagging far behind the Aeneid, Racine’s dramas, and various Roman histories. None of Metastasio’s opera seria libretti, which dominated serious opera for most of the eighteenth century, used stories from Ovid’s magnum opus. Why not? Metastasio did not leave behind an explanation, of course, but one may speculate that most of the stories in the Metamorphoses were too short, too redolent of “myth” as opposed to ancient history, too difficult to stage (how could a woman change into a cow and back in the theater?), and too lacking in developed or potentially heroic characters. As Pierpaolo Polzonetti tellingly writes, Ovid’s stories were used “more often than not for celebratory works for birthday and wedding festivities of the wealthiest aristocracy”: occasional works, in other words, the most conservative and propagandistic of eighteenth-century music-theatrical genres. However, as Polzonetti also notes, Ovid’s tales could also be found in abundance within explicitly experimental genres during this period. Gluck
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变形与动画
对于我们这些思考18世纪戏剧音乐类型的人来说——歌剧、节庆戏剧、情节剧、哑剧——奥维德的《变形记》始终是一种矛盾的存在:一种难以想象的丰富的古代故事和人物的字体,但总的来说,它被用于出现在主流之外的作品。俄耳甫斯和欧律狄刻的故事是一个明显的例外,它为歌剧的起源和表现力提供了神话。然而,这个故事在奥维德的诗中是一个奇怪的故事,除了死亡和肢解之外,没有任何变形,并且拥有一个异常详细的叙事结构和情感轨迹。更重要的是,在17和18世纪的歌剧中有很多俄耳甫斯的戏剧为歌剧院创作一部奥菲奥或俄耳甫斯的歌剧是与戏剧互文的互动远远超过了与《变形记》的想象世界的互动。在很大程度上,奥维德关于身体变形的故事集是严肃戏剧的二流来源,远远落后于《埃涅伊德》、拉辛的戏剧和各种罗马历史。在18世纪的大部分时间里,亚Metastasio的歌剧seria libretti都没有使用奥维德的巨著中的故事。为什么不呢?当然,《亚塔西奥》并没有留下任何解释,但人们可以推测,《变形记》中的大多数故事都太短了,太有“神话”的味道,而不是古代历史,太难以上演(一个女人怎么可能变成一头牛,然后又回到剧院?),也太缺乏成熟的或潜在的英雄人物。正如Pierpaolo Polzonetti生动地写道,奥维德的故事“经常被用于最富有的贵族的生日和婚礼庆典”:偶尔的作品,换句话说,是18世纪音乐戏剧流派中最保守和宣传的作品。然而,正如波尔佐内蒂也指出的那样,在这一时期,奥维德的故事也可以在明确的实验流派中找到大量。好运
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
17
期刊介绍: The Journal of Musicological Research publishes original articles on all aspects of the discipline of music: historical musicology, style and repertory studies, music theory, ethnomusicology, music education, organology, and interdisciplinary studies. Because contemporary music scholarship addresses critical and analytical issues from a multiplicity of viewpoints, the Journal of Musicological Research seeks to present studies from all perspectives, using the full spectrum of methodologies. This variety makes the Journal a place where scholarly approaches can coexist, in all their harmony and occasional discord, and one that is not allied with any particular school or viewpoint.
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