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Beyond Verismo: Massenet’s La Navarraise and ‘Realism’ in Fin-de-siècle Paris

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Bentley, CA 

Abstract

The ‘réalisme’ of Massenet’s La Navarraise divided critics at its belated Parisian première on 3 October 1895. While the opera has typically been read as a straightforward attempt at French verismo, this article suggests a more complex set of ways in which modernity and the modern world shaped critical perceptions of and responses to realism. Placing La Navarraise within its wider cultural and technological contexts, I argue that the critics’ ambivalence to its realism provides insight into the changing and contested nature of critical perception and subjectivity in Paris in the final years of the nineteenth century.

Description

Keywords

3603 Music, 36 Creative Arts and Writing

Journal Title

Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0269-0403
1471-6933

Volume Title

144

Publisher

Taylor & Francis