Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Stevens - Lulu's Daughters Final.pdf (4.71 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Lulu's Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013

Stevens, Nicholas David
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0091-9370
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1497460068959016

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Musicology.
In this dissertation, I argue that opera’s anti-heroine archetype – one of the most familiar in the genre’s historical canon – returned to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century, along with many of its typical tropes and plot trajectories. Between 1993 and 2013, four leading composers chose to update and adapt the basic idea of a transgressive heroine who rises in her society only to fall silent in the end. Each of the creative teams behind these works finds a novel way to modernize, transform, disrupt, or critique opera’s long tradition of doomed anti-heroines – but each also draws upon a common, historically rooted set of musical and dramatic devices in characterizing their compromised protagonists. Like Alban Berg’s Lulu of 1935, these operas incorporate forms of American popular music into modernist scores; all partake of and thematize audiovisual media, such as film, photography, and phonography. In an introduction, I trace the phenomenon of opera’s anti-heroine back to its historical heyday, and discuss the methodological and theoretical frameworks in which I operate. In the first two case studies, grouped under the heading Remembering the Twentieth Century, I examine new opera’s depictions of two real women who came of age between the wars. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll becomes a complex concatenation of archetypes in Thomas Ades and Philip Hensher’s Powder Her Face, and Anais Nin, the posthumous librettist and sole physical character of Louis Andriessen’s Anais Nin, becomes an insatiable femme fatale in the Dutch composer’s tightly edited biographical sketch. The second pair of case studies, American Dreams, Southern Scenes, and European (Re)visions, opens with a look at a third quasi-biographical account of a female celebrity’s rise and demise: Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole, a satire influenced by the tabloid culture of the 1990s and 2000s. In the final chapter, I turn to a work that eschews the depiction of a real woman, instead featuring a new version of a pre-existing operatic femme fatale: Berg’s Lulu, reimagined as an African-American native of New Orleans in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu. I conclude by suggesting paths forward, for both scholarship and contemporary opera.
Susan McClary, PhD (Advisor)
Daniel Goldmark, PhD (Committee Member)
Francesca Brittan, PhD (Committee Member)
Susanne Vees-Gulani, PhD (Committee Member)
Sherry Lee, PhD (Committee Member)
310 p.
Film Studies; Fine Arts; Gender Studies; Music; Theater Studies
media; jazz; popular music; chamber opera; monodrama; postopera; music theatre; gender; archetype; Berg, Alban; Ades, Thomas; Andriessen, Louis; Neuwirth, Olga; Turnage, Mark-Anthony; Nin, Anais; tabloid culture; modernism; narrative; voice

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Stevens, N. D. (2017). Lulu's Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013 [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1497460068959016

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Stevens, Nicholas. Lulu's Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013. 2017. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1497460068959016.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Stevens, Nicholas. "Lulu's Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1497460068959016

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1497460068959016
4,330
© 2017, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.