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- Title
Gaps, Pauses and Expressive Arms: Reconstructing the Link between Stage Gesture and Musical Timing at the Académie royale de musique.
- Authors
WENTZ, JED
- Abstract
One of the most salient features of French Baroque opera was its moulding of music, text and acting into a unified whole. This rigorous aesthetic resulted in a distinct performance style, one which melded the music and the singers' gestures on stage. This article will examine the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between stage action and passionate musical expression in France. Using the writings of Rousseau, Rameau and other participants of the Querelle des Bouffons as a starting point, the central place of the theory of the passions in the acting and musical aesthetics of the day will be examined. Special attention will be given to Lallemant's Essai sur le méchanisme des passions (1751), in which the physical manifestation of the passions in the human body is clearly linked to musical tempo. Having established the medical basis for such a link, it is easy to see how, aesthetically, a change of tempo would be felt as a change of affect and thus result in a physical change in the actor's gesturing body.
- Subjects
FRANCE; GESTURE in opera; FRENCH opera; DRAMA; ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778; RAMEAU, Jean-Philippe, 1683-1764; LALLEMANT, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph; MUSICAL aesthetics; QUERELLE des Bouffons; EIGHTEENTH century; LITERARY theory
- Publication
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2009, Vol 32, Issue 4, p607
- ISSN
1754-0194
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1754-0208.2009.00230.x