Metaphysical Song: An Essay on OperaIn this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. |
Contents
Voices of the Invisible | 5 |
Late Renaissance Opera | 11 |
A Cosmos of Apollinian Harmony | 30 |
Early Modern Opera | 36 |
The Borders of Theatrical Space | 70 |
Modern Opera | 75 |
Noumenal Themes | 106 |
Composing Schopenhauer | 109 |