Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann

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Description

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the P

Reviews

"While Hadlock's reading of Hoffman against its sources affords many keen insights, her reading of the opera against itself is even more revealing... A work of scintillating intelligence and endlessly intriguing possibilities."--M. Lignana Rosenberg, Opera News "In keeping with Offenbach's hybrid work, this book moves freely across academic borders--alongside the opera's literary origins sit historical and biographical contexts, and intertwined with straightforward musicology is feminist theory and philosophy... If you love the opera, and are not frightened of some solid intellectual abstractions, here is something for your bookshelves."--Julia Hollander, Opera Now "[An] attractive study of Offenbach's most enduring opera... [L]overs of Offenbach's masterpiece will enjoy the ride ... garnering insights into one of the most enjoyable and problematic operas in the central repertory."--Byron Nelson, Opera Quarterly

Author Bio

Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Stanford University.