Mimomania

Mary Ann Smart is Associate Professor in the Music Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (2000) and coeditor of Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (2001).

• Acknowledgments Chapter 1. In Praise of Overstatement Chapter 2. Wagner's Cancan, Fenella's Leap: La Muette de Portici and Auber's Reality Effect Chapter 3. Bellini's Unseen Voices Chapter 4. "Every Word Made Flesh": Les Huguenots and the Incarnation of the Invisible Chapter 5. Uneasy Bodies: Verdi and Sublimation Chapter 6. Mimomania: Allegory and Embodiment in Wagner's Music Dramas Notes Index

"A thoughtful, thought-provoking study of certain aspects of gestural music.... Bound to become a valuable reference source." - Ira Siff, Opera News "Mimomania is a thoughtful meditation on the persistence and transformation of the musical mimicry of bodily gesture in nineteenth-century opera. Incorporating and reacting to feminist critique, film studies, and recent, new-wave opera studies, Smart shows that this ostensibly straightforward relation of music and action hides unexpected complexities. From these the rethinks important works from the period and indeed the relation of its two giants, Verdi and Wagner." - Gary Tomlinson, author of Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera "Mary Ann Smart's important and timely book documents - deftly and in rich musical detail - the ways that nineteenth-century operas reflect a character's emotive state in the music and in sometimes closely coordinated physical gestures. Opera lovers will delight in applying Smart's insights to yet other works: ones that they know, love, and sometimes puzzle over." - Ralph P. Locke, Professor of Musicology, Eastman School of Music"