- Title Information
- Title
- Circling Opera in Berlin
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Chaikin, Paul Martin
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
(keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
- 2009
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vii, 209 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2010)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Subotnik, Rose
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Titon, Jeff
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gooley, Dana
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Rosen, Philip
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Music. Ethnomusicology
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- On a typical night at the opera, the musico-dramatic synthesis that takes place on stage is saturated in atmosphere, but the proceedings off-stage are no less extravagant. A
bejeweled crowd congregates in front of a stately façade, and inside, marble tiles and mirrors intensify the white light that emanates from the innumerable chandeliers. The auditorium itself is
upholstered in velvet, and the crowd behaves in accordance with an implicit sense of ceremony. A gilded aura permeates the entire affair. My dissertation is a study of this lavish tradition as
it persists in contemporary Berlin. I focus on extra-musical context, with chapters on opera house architecture, the politics of public subsidies, the experience of being in the audience, and
the currency of a good scandal. I hope to show how an elaborate superstructure and an entrenched belief system help shape opera into a meaningful field of experience. This mosaic of operatic
affairs in Berlin doubles as a critique of the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. The notion of aesthetic autonomy first emerges in European thought in the late 18th century, when aestheticians
begin to regard works of art as inviolable objects that serve no secondary purpose. In the burgeoning market economy, these functionless vessels of beauty come to exemplify the inverted logic of
commodity fetishism, in which exchange-value eclipses use-value. As members of the bourgeois public begin to pay for access to museums and concert halls, they learn to value individual works of
art as objective distillations of the autonomy that they crave in their own lives. The doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is, in many ways, a naïve ideology, but it continues to regulate experience
in the world of opera. By examining the context in which operatic works take place, I hope to show how the notion of aesthetic autonomy prolongs its outmoded existence by ensconcing itself in a
luxuriant aura.
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Berlin
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- aesthetic autonomy
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Theodor Adorno
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Walter Benjamin
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1046191")
- Topic
- Operas
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/821342")
- Topic
- Aura
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/48481")
- Name
- Name Part
- Adorno, Theodor W.
- Name Part:
Date
- 1903-1969
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/386907")
- Name
- Name Part
- Benjamin, Walter W.
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1204829")
- Geographic
- Germany--Berlin
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20091218
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0H41PQ5
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations