Bodily Charm: Living Opera (Abraham Lincoln Lectures Series) - Tapa dura

"If the challenge and fascination of producing opera is the visual realisation of what we hear in the music--of seeing with our ears and hearing with our eyes--this book should be the companion of every conductor, stage director, opera lover, or simply those curious about the irrational animal that opera is. Once again Linda and Michael Hutcheon have produced a work of imagination, illumination, and thoughtfulness which derives from their remarkably passionate love and comprehensive knowledge of opera. They face with absorbing success the daunting question of why opera causes such extraordinary and extreme reactions in apparently sane people. This is a book for the professional and the amateur; it kept me reading far into the night."--Richard Bradshaw, international conductor and general director of the Canadian Opera Company. "'Body criticism' meets opera, and the encounter--as we would expect from the Hutcheons--is by turns entertaining and perplexing, edifying and strangely moving: a vade mecum for anyone who has felt the tremors of operatic ecstasy."--Roger Parker, author of Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse. "... the authors draw from an impressively broad church of opinion ... there is much stimulation here."--BBC Music Magazine, December 2001

Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body-both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.