Event details
Gendered Geographies in Lully’s Proserpine (1680)
The Composition Colloquium Series presents this lecture, given by University of Pittsburg Music Professor, Olivia Bloechl.
Mobility and displacement were integral to the stories that early European opera staged, as characters routinely moved between fictional settings in ways that mattered dramatically and politically. I’ll explore the political significance of this mobility in Jean-Baptiste Lully/Philippe Quinault’s Proserpine (1680), a mythological tragédie en musique dramatizing the kidnapping and rape of Proserpina by Pluto, god of the underworld. Spectacle-oriented French audiences enjoyed characters’ movements between ordinary and marvelous settings in mythological plots, and these transitions also helped to organize the genre’s “imaginative geographies.” Interestingly, early productions of Proserpine located the opera's action in settings associated with life at court, and they organized the principals’ movements between these settings in ways that would have evoked, especially for women spectators, habitual experiences of sovereign power as gendered biopower. I will focus on two such experiences—being monitored as a sexed body and being vulnerable to dispossession or violence in patriarchal spaces—and conclude with some thoughts on the difference that gender makes in opera’s geographies.
Free, Unticketed.
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