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Dissertation Information for Kelly Jo Maynard

NAME:
- Kelly Jo Maynard

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Debora L. Silverman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Lynn A. Hunt
- Mitchell Bryan Morris
- Robert Wohl

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The enemy within: Encountering Wagner in early Third Republic France

Abstract: Lying at the disciplinary intersection of historical musicology and cultural history, this dissertation explores the powerful cultural force embedded in Richard Wagner's works in the context of the early Third Republic in France. Although he was celebrated and widely performed everywhere else in Europe by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Wagner remained conspicuously absent from French stages. Virulent nationalism following the Franco-Prussian War posed a serious threat to government stability in France; as a self-proclaimed German composer and erstwhile critic of the French, Wagner became a lightening rod for revanchiste troublemaking. Repeated attempts to stage his opera Lohengrin in Paris in the 1880s prompted vitriolic press campaigns, street demonstrations, death threats, complex undercover police activity--and ultimate failure for the productions.

In response to this climate of hostility, Parisian conductors programmed excerpts from Wagner's works on orchestral concerts and gradually habituated the listening public to the music itself. Constructed with innovative uses of rhythm, orchestration, voicing, and harmony, these excerpts often caused listeners to feel dizzy, penetrated, and transported: they testified that the music had allowed them access to an interior world. Such responses were recorded, remarkably, in the petites revues of the 1880s, when such small, independent papers dedicated to a spirit of openness, integrity, and community, exploded onto the scene as an alternative to the corrupt mainstream press. Three listeners and contributors, Édouard Dujardin, Louis de Fourcaud, and Pierre Bonnier, encountered Wagner's works at crucial points early in their careers. Their experience of an interior world came to shape their professional activities in the fields of literature, art history and criticism, and neurology respectively.

In demonstrating the lasting influence of these encounters with Wagner in France in the 1880s, I argue for the powerful cultural force embodied in music. I combine analyses of the press, political violence, aesthetic experience, musical content, avant-garde literature, neuro-psychology, and the shaping of national identity through culture, in unprecedented methodological ways. In so doing, I propose a model of cultural history which allows for the content and experience of music to be reinscribed in the historical record.

MPACT Scores for Kelly Jo Maynard

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-07 13:54:30

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Students under Kelly Jo Maynard

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None