Beschreibung:
This study interrogates press caricatures and cartoons, popular song, staged revue and opera parodies to discover the role they play within the Parisian theatrical, social, and wider cultural context and economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the beginnings of Wagner reception in Paris, through the heyday of 'opéra bouffe' in the hands of that comic genius Hervé, to the international operatic repertoire played on Parisian stages in the 1890s - including works by Massenet and Saint-Saëns performed during an increasingly tense nationalist climate - this book examines the workings of parody which draw on opera for their subject material and the ways in which this satirical mode of critique works, and for whom. While at face value, much parodical treatment criticises the hypotext, in analysing a wide range of intertextual 'texts', parody is revealed as a process which bolsters cultural norms, neutralises alterity or innovation of all forms and invariably throws the satirical and critical commentary back onto internal and local cultural products and debates. 'Opera and Parody in Paris, 1860-1900' uncovers a huge amount of primary and hitherto unpublished sources - libretti, scores, caricatures - in an analysis of intermedial materials that may be read as reception documents, as 'autonomous' artistic products, and more broadly as highly appealing cultural phenomena