'Sospirare, tremare, piangere': Conventions of the body in Italian opera.

摘要

Although scholars have often commented on the ubiquity of the "woman in distress" in Italian opera, a history of this figure has yet to be written. My dissertation pursues this path by examining the relationship between physicality, sentiment, and gender in early nineteenth-century Italian opera, focusing on its indebtedness to earlier modes of expression inherited from the sentimental opera of the eighteenth century. Throughout, I pay special attention to the mimetic topoi that saturate the opera of the period---sighs, shudders, and tears---arguing that as the taste for sentimental display shifted in Italy, new versions of the suffering heroine were forged from sometimes conflicting cultural influences.;Taking as case studies scenes by Paisiello, Paer, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi that showcase the body in particularly emphatic ways, the dissertation pairs detailed musical analyses with consideration of contemporary literary, political, and medical discourses of the body and sensation. Chapters 1 and 4 investigate the literary influences on sentimental and gothic opera to show how Italian operatic representations of the weeping body both drew on and departed from the bodily themes of their French and English texts. Chapter 2 interprets Rossini's noisy finales in relation to contemporary physiological theories and explores the musical tension between sentiment and clamor that many commentators (even fans like Stendhal) found unsettling. Chapter 3 places Bellini's new restrained melodic style in the context of debates about both the undesirability of extravagant emotional display and the return of corsetry, a fashion of bodily restraint. The final chapter explores how interiority in Verdi's operas relies upon the very bodily conventions it seems to renounce: in scenes for solitary sopranos, mimetic weeping figures are often heard emanating from the orchestral texture.;Rather than consign operatic conventions to the realm of the "purely musical," I argue that the repeated insistence on the topoi of bodily distress throughout the early nineteenth century represents a distinctly Italian approach to Romanticism, one that shuns metaphysical realms for embodied expression.