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Burke_Devin_Dissertation.pdf (16.09 MB)

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Music, Magic, and Mechanics: The Living Statue in Ancien-Régime Spectacle

Burke, Devin Michael Paul
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3657-3842
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1449258139

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Musicology.
The animated statue represented one of the central magical figures in French musical theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the period covered by this dissertation, 1661-1748, animated statues appeared in more than sixty works of musical theater of almost every available genre. This number does not include the many works containing statues that demonstrated magical or otherworldly properties through means other than movement or song. Some of the works of this period that feature living statues are well-known to musicologists—e.g. Molière/Jean-Baptiste Lully’s comedy-ballet Les Fâcheux (1661), Lully’s opera Cadmus et Hermione (1673), and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s one-act ballet Pigmalion (1748)—while others have received little recognition. This dissertation is the first study to consider the history of animated statues on the French stage during this period, and the first to reveal music as a defining feature of these statues. Over the course of nearly ninety years, music assumed an increasingly important role in the theatrical treatments of these figures that operated in the space between magic and mechanics. At the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, animated statues appeared with some frequency in both public and court spectacles. By the mid-eighteenth century, the animated statue had become the central focus of many works and had transformed into a potent symbol of, among other ideas, the power of music and dance, as most dramatically realized in Rameau’s Pigmalion. This dissertation traces the history of this transformation.
Georgia Cowart (Committee Co-Chair)
Francesca Brittan (Committee Co-Chair)
Susan McClary (Committee Member)
Elina Gertsman (Committee Member)
296 p.
Art History; Dance; European History; Music; Theater
Louis XIV; ballet; opera; music; sculpture; French Baroque; automata; idolatry; Lully; Rameau; magic; aesthetics; politics; Paris; statues; Ovid; Pygmalion; dance; voice; Enlightenment; theatre; spectacle

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Burke, D. M. P. (2016). Music, Magic, and Mechanics: The Living Statue in Ancien-Régime Spectacle [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1449258139

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Burke, Devin. Music, Magic, and Mechanics: The Living Statue in Ancien-Régime Spectacle. 2016. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1449258139.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Burke, Devin. "Music, Magic, and Mechanics: The Living Statue in Ancien-Régime Spectacle." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1449258139

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1449258139
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© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.