Swordmage by Richard Baker

Swordmage by Richard Baker

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 Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject.

Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and op ra-comiques. Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the mad loves that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

RICHARD BAKER has worked as a game designer since 1991. A former officer in the US Navy, he has written or contributed to more than 70 game products, including the rules for both 3rd and 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and Axis & Allies Miniatures. Rich is also the author of eight Forgotten Realms novels, including the New York Times bestseller Condemnation.
LOGAN BONNER works as a game designer for Wizards of the Coast, Inc. His professional RPG credits include City of Stormreach, Dungeonscape, and the Magic Item Compendium.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780786947881
ISBN 10	0786947888
Titel	Swordmage
Autor	Richard Baker
Serie	Blades Of The Moonsea
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Wizards of the Coast
Erscheinungsjahr	2008-05-06
Seitenanzahl	341
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar