1,720,982 research outputs found
Performing Verdi's <i>Otello</i> in Fin-de-Siècle London
No full textThe premiere of Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s opera Otello on 5 February 1887 at La Scala, Milan was an event of international significance. The first London performances in July 1889 were given by many of the cast who had participated in the Milan premiere, including Francesco Tamagno as Otello, Victor Maurel as Iago, and the conductor Franco Faccio. This chapter considers the London premiere, arguing that contemporary discussions of subjects such as acting and singing techniques, finance, Wagnerian influence, celebrity, and national versus international style, are all bound up with larger questions of British national identity at the fin-du-siècle. The author also compares the reception of Tamagno’s performance with that of the Polish tenor Jean De Reszke, who took on the part two years later in London. The author contends that debates about these singers’ conceptions of the role recasts an earlier controversy about the relative merits of two of the most famous Victorian Othellos, the Italian Salvini and the British Irving. Shakespeare’s cultural status is, of course, central to all these debates. On the one hand, Victorian commentators on Verdi’s opera assert Shakespeare’s unique and dominant Britishness. On the other hand, the appropriation of the Bard in the ‘foreign’ medium of opera, and by foreign nations and performers, reveals nascent anxieties about the ideological security of Shakespeare, and by implication Britain, in the age of Empire
Benjamin Britten and Christianity
Full text linkThis thesis charts the significance of the topic of Christianity in the dramaturgy of Britten's operas, hi light of recent research, it takes an essentially negative view of Britten's relationship with the religious orthodoxy of his day, a view consistent with Britten's own. However, it will be demonstrated that a dialectic with the Christian element is embodied in a majority of Britten's operatic dramaturgies. This is, in part, connected to the established theme of Britten's obsession with the corruption of innocence by experience: it is rooted in the association of a 'clear, untroubled' Christian belief with the innocence of a childhood dominated by his religious mother; the experience of adult life with Pears after the death of his parents; the decisive impact of W.H. Auden, who primarily effected the transition between these two worlds.It will be shown how these factors influenced the shaping of the libretti of his operas. It will also be shown how the Christian dialectic, manifesting itself most powerfully and painfully in the War Requiem and three parables for Church performance of the 1960s, is one of a number of discretely autonomous strata that form the unique admixture of Britten's aesthetic and artistic personality.It will be demonstrated, in conclusion, that in art as in life, the contingencies Britten imposed upon the Christian element are ultimately displaced by other 'non-Christian' elements related to the Classical paradigm
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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