Please join us for the second-to-last workshop of the year — next Wednesday!

Maria Josefa Velasco
Interpreting the Dreams of Méhul and Duval’s Joseph (1807): Opera and a New Religious Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France

Wednesday, May 22 @ 4:30 PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Terrace Seminar Room 801

Mari Jo writes:

The paper draft I have submitted for your perusal is one I wrote for the seminar, “Power Plays: Opera and Politics, c. 1750-1800” taught by Visiting Professor Erling Sandmo. It explores how Etienne-Nicolas Méhul’s 1807 opera Joseph evokes a return to a simple, subjective religious sensibility amongst the powerful shifts in post-Revolutionary French society. Although scholars such as Elizabeth Bartlet have shown how stylistic and dramatic innovations at the Opéra-Comique during the Revolutionary period had a strong impact on the development of Romantic opera, I wish to examine in this paper how Méhul’s Joseph in particular contributes a music-dramatic portrayal of a revitalized religious sentiment which becomes highly influential in Romantic thinking.

My hope is to use this study as an entry into a broader research interest in tracing the complex, multi-faceted ebb and flow of religious sentiment and practice in France in the aftermath of the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. I am interested in exploring how music reveals certain aspects of the tensions between efforts to reinstitute Catholicism and the currents of secularization and anti-clericalism. With this paper on Méhul’s opera and your helpful feedback at our workshop conversation, I hope to consider these questions of musical representation and changing views on spirituality and religious practice in France.

Jessica Peritz will serve as respondent. All are welcome to attend!

To download the document, click here.

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