Art In Relation Research Articles

Bruno Schulz – mistrz, inspirator czy literacki ojciec Jerzego Ficowskiego

Bruno Schulz – master, inspiration or literary father for Jerzy Ficowski This article explores the artistic relationship between Jerzy Ficowski and Bruno Schulz. For the first time Ficowski came across Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops in 1942, as a 17 year old adolescent. He remembered that first reading as a moment of epiphany which occurred to be crucial to the whole further Ficowski’s literary biography. The young poet hailed the author of The Cinnamon Shops as his great master, the only one who dared to express the true importance of myth to the artistic imagination in such an unique way. The influence of Schulz’s prose on Ficowski’s poetry was unquestionable. However, this does not mean that Ficowski’s work was secondary to Schulz’s or less original. Jerzy Ficowski, like Schulz, emphasized the importance of childhood and myth in a poet’s imagination. On the other hand, both writers found themselves different ways to express those ideas in artistic way. To analyze the unique nature of artistic relationship between Bruno Schulz and Jerzy Ficowski, I refer to the famous Harold Bloom’s work The Anxiety of Influence. A theory of Poetry.Key words: Jerzy Ficowski; Bruno Schulz; biography; interpretation; fictionalisation; the impact of poetic; Paul Ricoeur; Harold Bloom; psychoanalysis;

Un cuadro inédito de San Miguel Arcángel, obra de Giacomo Farelli, en Alcalá de Henares

En este artículo se da a conocer la existencia de un cuadro, hasta ahora inédito, que representa a San Miguel Arcángel venciendo al demonio. Es propiedad de la congregación de los Hermanos Maristas y se conserva en su casa provincial de Alcalá de Henares. Una reciente restauración ha permitido atribuirlo a Giacomo Farelli, artista barroco vinculado a la Escuela Napolitana de Pintura de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII. El cuadro tiene un notable interés por su calidad y por la escasez de obras de Farelli que hay en España. La publicación de este trabajo de investigación pretende contribuir a un mayor conocimiento de la figura de este pintor y de las fructíferas relaciones histórico-artísticas desarrolladas entre España e Italia.

Mahler's Bruckner, between Devotion and Misprision

This article centers on a detailed study of Mahler's performing version of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony. This study, which is based on the orchestral materials used in Mahler's performances in Vienna (1900) and New York (1910), outlines the changes Mahler made to the work, particularly a series of major cuts, and considers their musical significance. The article uses these observations as an occasion for analyzing aspects of Mahler's complex personal and musical relationship to the older composer. It argues that, beyond the manifest issues of symphonic form and style raised by Mahler's adaptation, something deeper was also at work: in performing Bruckner in a heavily edited form Mahler was unconsciously negotiating his own artistic relationship to his great predecessor. This process must have been particularly fraught given Mahler's deeply contradictory sentiments about Bruckner's music, the two composers’ personal relationship, and the public's image of their affiliation. The article argues that Mahler's treatment of Bruckner's Fourth was palpably haunted by what Harold Bloom famously defined as “the anxiety of influence” and that this led him to attempt to remake Bruckner's symphony in ways that were more in keeping with his own artistic self-image. It concludes by suggesting that later generations have inherited something of Mahler's anxiety about his musical affiliation with Bruckner.

Influssi sinaiti nell’iconografia nicolaiana a Brindisi. L’icona murale monumentale di san Nicola della chiesa della Santissima Trinità – Santa Lucia

The paper examines an important and, at the same time, little known parietal icon of the late 13th century, kept in the crypt of the church of Santissima Trinita - Santa Lucia in Brindisi, representing St. Nicholas of Myra. Of the fresco, considerable in size, is offered a thorough reading which, starting with iconographic elements until now escaped to criticism, clarifies the meaning and functions of the image inside the cultual environment of Brindisi, linked by close cultural and artistic relationships with the Christian East. In virtue of the high executive quality, of the extreme care in the rendering of details and, above all, of the fidelity to the archetypal icons of the bishop of Myra, particularly to those kept in the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, the fresco qualifies as one of the best examples of monumental mural icon of the high Middle Ages, but also as one of the finest surviving images of Sinaite or crusader matrix representing St. Nicholas.

The Crisis of Aestheticism

Reviewed by: Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism by Forest Pyle Karen Weisman (bio) Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism by Forest Pyle. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Pp. 322, 11 ills. This is a passionate book about a passionate subject; in fact, the experience of reading this text comes close to replicating one aspect of the central dynamic it describes: "how the literary representations of aestheticization can in certain circumstances result in an aestheticism powerful and extreme enough to deliver us to the roots of the aesthetic" (xi–xii). Forest Pyle reads Romantic and post-Romantic texts in a white heat of critical engagement, an appropriate stance for a critic who sets himself the task of staring into the heart of a radical aestheticism, one that he defines as art reaching its own fever pitch, by which the putative claims of the aesthetic are undone: "At certain moments in certain texts by each of these writers we encounter a radical aestheticism, one that undoes the claims made in the name of the aesthetic—as redemptive, restorative, liberating, compensatory, humanizing, healing—claims that are not only an irreducible aspect of the legacy of Romanticism, but are often spelled out in their most compelling forms by the writers themselves" (5). The radical of the aesthetic in Pyle's hands becomes a vacant luminosity, one that we occupy with a silent, wild surmise. Pyle's Romanticism, then, is highly self-reflexive and postdeconstructionist, with some cultural materialism serving as warm side notes. Radical aestheticism is an experience of an interference [End Page 671] that negates, or rather undoes, the claims of knowledge that are putatively related to art. At the same time, the experience of such radicalization is emphatically not a tacit claim for art's autonomy. This is no valorization of art for art's sake. Precisely because what Pyle terms radical aestheticism offers no redemptive claims for art in the arena of ethics, politics, or aesthetics, the encounter with it is often registered as an unmaking or as combustion or as flaring. Pyle observes several criteria to meet the designation of radical aestheticism. The first will be most familiar to students of close reading: the text "must reflect on art and its effects" (3). The text must "pose or present questions about art's relationship to history or to knowledge, and on the relationship between art's sensuous aspects and its ethical, political, or theological responsibilities" (3); "and finally, a text can be understood as succumbing to a radical aestheticism the moment it finds itself and its representations of the aesthetic at its vacating radical" (4, emphasis in the original). What we have, then, is a view of a highly self-reflexive literature that owes a great deal to Walter Benjamin's theory of the "aura" but also to Paul de Man's textual disarticulations. Pyle indeed cites several canonical twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists throughout his chapters, and he reads them as a sort of parallel text to the Romantics. Read alongside Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, and Wilde are Benjamin, de Man, Barthes, Derrida, Agamben, Lacan, Bataille, and others. Pyle is not claiming that we need one to understand the other, and he is certainly not reducing such parallel reading to the domain of "influence"; rather, he seems to be modeling different approaches to critical distance even as he draws ever nearer to the heart of the texts' catastrophes. In this, he is trying to clarify a dynamic of reading and of writing that calls out for rigorous conceptualizing. There must be several access points into this complicated and complicating process of understanding a text's negation of its own project. One of the delights of this text is the scrutiny of authors' manipulations of their formalist and generic inheritance. Pyle performs close readings of his authors' formalist power, readings that are themselves theorized. Pyle is insistent that he is not positing a totalizing theory of Romanticism. He repeats over and over again that the dynamic he studies is something that occurs only "at certain moments in certain texts." This is a phrase very self-consciously reiterated throughout all...

Природные образы в романе Ж. де Сталь «Коринна, или Италия»

The artistic relationships of landscape space and national character in the novel by a French writer of the 19 th century G. de Stael are examined. The research urgency is caused by the interest of representatives of different areas of the humanities, including literary critics, to the comparative study of peoples in the context of the rapid development of intercultural communication. It is shown that nature as a whole as “the phenomenon of the poetic image” is of great interest from the point of view of analysis of its impact on the character and emotional state of the characters of the novel. Not less important role plays the analysis of specific natural images of Sun, Moon, Earth, Mountains, Water and Fire that are the deepest archetypes, rooted in the collective unconscious. The author comes to the conclusion that these archaic concepts are reinterpreted by the writer under the influence on the formation of national identity, character and habits of the individual, therefore, it becomes possible for the reader to understand the national mentality through the natural archetypes of the novel. It is shown that in the novel the author creates a verbal-based acceptance of “collateral characteristic of mood,” which will then be actively used in the cinema. It is noted that the functions of the landscape in the novel by the French writer would later become the example for the following generations of authors in the description of the southern Italian landscape.

Abstracts for the PSA Panel at MLA 2017

Abstracts for the PSA Panel at MLA 2017

The Influence of the Holy Quran on Sheikh Kazem Al-Ozri Book of Poem

Quran since the advent has been of interest to all human beings as a holy script. Poets benefited from it in creating their works of poetry given a special boom to them. Sheikh Kazem Al-Ozri Baghdadi (1143-1213 AH) is a committed poet with a lot of interest in the holy script in composing his book of poems. In this article we examine the influence of the Holy Quran, on the basis of technical and artistic intertextual relationship in terms of inspiration, the perfect combination, and modification, referential and stylistic using a descriptive adaptive method. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s2p134

Transformation through art: exploring Jung's view of art and the relevance of Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater?

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Jung's concepts regarding art, the significant role of creativity in his notion of individuation, and art's relationship to transformation. As an illustration, it introduces Charlotte Salomon – a German Jewish artist who was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1943 – and her unique surviving opus, Life? or Theater? – a fictionalized autobiographical play-like work of art combining painted images, written words, and music. Applying Jung's theories as a lens, it broadly analyzes Salomon's work and considers it in light of Jung's distinction between psychological and visionary creative modes. In the process I reveal a potential material connection between Salomon and Jung, and argue that Life? or Theater? is not only artistically but also historically relevant to Jungian theory. By exploring Life? or Theater? in this way, my paper proposes that Jungian theory is a potent critical lens which can reveal a work of art's transformative nature and cultural significance.

Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 by Sonal Khullar, and: Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria by Chika Okeke-Agulu

Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 368 pp. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 376 pp. I. In this essay, I explore state of study of visual modernism in geographical areas outside of its ordained point of origin in Europe, using as a point of entry two volumes published in 2015, Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria and Sonal Khullar's Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990. Okeke-Agulu and Khullar both contribute to a growing body of local and national histories that recast modern art's relationship to nation and nationalist discourse as a productive site of meaning-making in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Nonetheless, because of intimate relationship between modernism and narratives that define it on one hand, and colonialism on other, a number of assumptions continue to plague perception of non-Western modernism, all of which are connected to its relationship with [...] Western art traditions, its apparent inauthenticity and derivativeness, its supposed lack of comparative sophistication, [and] its troubling intimacy with cultural (Okeke-Agulu 6). In pages that follow, I explore how Okeke-Agulu and Khullar deal with these assumptions, situating their accounts of Nigerian and Indian modernism within context of art history's global turn. I argue that these authors offer avenues for expansion of art history's geographical reach without reducing disparate practices and discourses that define them to a single modernist temporality. Two common threads run through their books: on one hand, both authors emphasize local and national discursive parameters of contexts under investigation as constitutive of modern art; on other hand, both establish continuity between modern and contemporary, in Nigeria and India respectively, against a prevalent narrative of colonial rupture. In Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, Okeke-Agulu focuses on Nigerian art in decade of political independence, between 1957 and 1967, and in decades leading up to it. In particular, author pays close attention to terms in which visual modernism was imagined by artists themselves, and by contemporary Nigerian critics and writers, and uses these as a framework for understanding their practice. Against commonly held assumptions of abject dependency on nationalist ideology or on European models, author reframes relationship between art and nationalist ideology as discursively productive. Cultural nationalism was indeed central to ways in which artists conceived of their work, and the conjunction of art and nationalist ideology is an important characteristic of postcolonial modernism as an international mid-twentieth-century phenomenon (2). Furthermore, Okeke-Agulu reframes relationship of Nigerian modernism to European art in terms of idea of natural synthesis, deployed in Nigeria at time, which he defines as the selective use of artistic resources and forms from Nigerian/African and European traditions (1). In Worldly Affiliations, Khullar adopts a comparable approach, attending to terms of debates that surrounded art in India between 1930 and 1990. She takes binary between and West to be a central fact of Indian modernism, and argues that in India, as in Europe, this binary must be taken seriously, as East and West were marshaled as formal and social attributes in art history's most crucial debates on naturalism and abstraction, line and color, art and crafts, masculinity and femininity, nature and culture (12). …

Nikolai Gogol’s literary characters in the Ilya Repin’s graphic and pictorial works. To the question about morphological problem at the Russian artistic culture in the late XIX — beginning XX century

This article is dedicated to the cultural heritage of two prominent Russian creative figures: Ilya Repin and Nikolai Gogol. The objective of this study is to show the artistic relationship between the aforementioned figures while drawing on their artistic oeuvre for examples. A comparative analysis of Gogol and Repin’s work has been carried out and a multitude of links between the artist and the great writer’s body of work have been researched. By analysing Repin’s paintings, graphics and theatrical works related to Gogol, the artist’s lesser known works have been studied and new aspects of his artistic life have been examined. The common subject matter of I. Repin and N. Gogol’s works indicate not only the influence of the tendentious ‘literary’ democratic line of 19th century Russian painting, but also the artists’ shared ideological and aesthetic roots, in particular Ukrainian folk epic poems, which are inherent to both their satiric talent and the unity of their philosophical-religious views.

The Iconographic Motif of a Griffin and a Hare on the So-called Saracenic-Sicilian Casket from the Wawel Cathedral Treasury in Cracow

The article examines a kind of community of aesthetic tastes that was connecting Arab and Byzantine courtly culture. This community concerned the secular and luxurious works of art. The silver casket, called a Saracenic-Sicilian, from the Wawel Cathedral Treasury in Cracow will serve as the starting point to gain a true appreciation of the complex artistic relationship between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. It appears highly probable that the casket was created in the twelfth century. It was published at once after the discovery (8th March 1881) and since then, researchers argue about the place of origin of the box. Some suggest that the casket could be a product of Arabic or Persian art, while others propose either Byzantine or Sicilian workshops. What is more, even an thorough stylistic and iconographic analysis does not allow for an unambiguous resolution of the problem of provenance of the Wawel box. Lack of a resolution suggests that this piece of art was directed to a member of the cosmopolitan elite of – Arabic or Byzantine – court, which took delight in sophisticated and expensive luxury items. It is worth noting that in this case, matter of religion did not play a crucial role. For this reason, the depicted scenes and decorative details have an universal character. In order to present this specific synthesis of Arabic and Byzantine secular art, the motifs of a griffin and a hare, decorating the casket will be considered.

Network(ed) TV: Collaboration and Intervention at Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and Videogalerie Schum

In 1969 Gerry Schum short-circuited conventional mode of art production and exhibition with a broadcast of contemporary artist films on television. Schum--a documentary filmmaker for West German broadcast television--saw traditional hierarchies of painting and sculpture as outdated, and institutions in which they circulated as an inaccessible system. He sought ways to challenge what he referred to as the eternal triangle of studio, gallery, collector, (1) and employed network systems via conceptual means to achieve new forms of communication. The Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (1968-70), a conceptual that produced and exhibited artist films for broadcast on television, and Videogalerie Schum (1971-73), first commercial gallery dedicated to production and sale of editioned artist videotapes, were animated by a sensibility born from dynamic nature of film, broadcast television, and video technology, that was also a major precursor to rise of new media and video art collectives in Europe and United States in following decade. The apogee of this strategy--democratizing art object and exhibition--served to decentralize and decommodify work of art, and in turn reclaimed agency of artists and audiences from institutional confines of galleries and museums. Despite Schum's innovative and prescient articulation of art and technology, there has been very little critical writing about Schum and his pioneering experiments in television and video distribution outside of Europe. To reexamine Schum's pursuit of artistic collaboration and communication in postwar landscape is an effort in recontextualizing historic understanding of his work--away from traditional concept of a single creator and toward a new understanding of collaboration. Thus, Schum's approach to time-based art and democratic aspirations, as well as dynamic nature of loosely organized group of artists he worked with, require further study. The strategies were revolutionary, and are especially relevant to ever-changing landscape of contemporary art and technology today. This (overdue) study examines Schum's network of artists and system through which their work was produced. Faking specific works as examples of what I identify as networked and Schum's role as proto-curator of screen-based art, this essay will provide a comprehensive exploration into televisual activities of Schum's projects that have yet to be discussed elsewhere. Is it possible to create a virtual network through television? How can a nexus of transmitted art maintain cohesive impact or influence? What does it mean to curate for screen? These are some of questions 1 intend to pursue, while analyzing themes of authorship, collaboration, and curatorial tendencies that emerged from art's relationship with TV. In tradition of futurists, surrealists, and Dada--collective artist practices that experimented and exploited new media, like sound, radio, and film--the Fernsehgalerie (translated in English as Gallery) attempted to conjoin innovations in technology with new artistic modes of collaboration. Separated by nationality and discipline, artists involved with TV Gallery did not interact with one another, nor did they see each other's work before each broadcast exhibition. Similar to a network like Fluxus, artists working with Schum and his wife, Ursula Wevers, were connected by their shared interest in new media as a response against object-based practice. But unlike Fluxus and its distant collaborative performances or mail art networks, Schum's network existed only by virtue of his lens and broadcast and distribution system that allowed television transmission and, later, video distribution. In Schum's first television broadcast, Land Art (1969), Richard Long conceived and executed his first work on film in Dartmoor, England, while Barry Flanagan, Jan Dibbets, and Marinus Boezem instigated impressions in other European land and seascapes. …

Carelessness or curatorial chutzpah? On controversies surrounding street art in the museum

SummaryTaking the exhibition Art in the Streets, which was shown at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 17 April to 8 August, 2011, as its main point of departure, the present article discusses street art's association with the institutions of the art world. Art in the Streets sparked a lot of debate before, while and after it took place. The article primarily focuses on two aspects of the controversies connected with the exhibition. First, it looks at the reaction of conservative American commentators, who saw Art in the Streets as problematic because of its apparent validation of vandalism as art. The article argues that this critical response should be understood not just as the result of pre-existing animosity towards graffiti and street art, but also as an expression of a particular idea about the role museums play in society. Second, the article considers the reaction to Art in the Streets of street art aficionados, who saw the museum's representation of street based artistic expressions as problematic. The criticism from within the street art world was fuelled by the removal of a commissioned artwork by the Italian artist BLU from the façade of the museum building prior to the opening of the exhibition. On the one hand, it is argued that this curatorial decision can be seen as symptomatic of the show's failure to integrate a non-institutional form of expression in an institutional context. On the other hand, it is argued that the removal can be related to the whitewashing process which takes place in the street every day, thus effectively reproducing in the institutional environment the conditions under which street art is produced. With an outset in a number of artistic responses to Art in the Streets, the article is concluded by a more overarching discussion about street art's relationship with the institutional art world. Here it is argued that the relevance and perceived authenticity of street art is challenged by the interest from excluding and conservational art institutions, which street art to some extent exists in opposition to. Given the unsanctioned nature of street art, as well as street art's connection to the street, it is further argued that while institutions can create shows that document and discuss the history of art in the street, and can show artworks derived from this context, street art proper cannot exist in an institutional context.

The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Abstract The prolonged public fascination with the Fitzgeralds’ lives has not changed the way we think about inspiration, collaboration, or the personal and the professional designations used for various kinds of artists. By relying upon a traditional, stereotypical conception of the artist and the muse, we have reinforced an either/or schematic that erases the subtler, yet still meaningful elements of their relationship. Thanks to Zelda Fitzgerald's growing interest in her writing career, the Fitzgeralds’ personal and artistic relationship developed through phases during their years together—from musedom to apprenticeship, then from collaboration to a more autonomous sense of individual artistic identities. F. Scott Fitzgerald's periodic resistance to his wife's development, I argue, was influenced not only by a desire to defend his artistic turf but also by the modernist ideology of the period that portrayed the professional artist as a masculine paragon who defended “true” literature against the feminized popular masses. By placing the Fitzgeralds’ artistic struggles within this historical context, we are able to get a fuller, more accurate view of the nature of their conflict, and we can use their case as a representative example through which to examine the gendered notions inherent in the ideology of artistic production at the time.

The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Abstract The prolonged public fascination with the Fitzgeralds’ lives has not changed the way we think about inspiration, collaboration, or the personal and the professional designations used for various kinds of artists. By relying upon a traditional, stereotypical conception of the artist and the muse, we have reinforced an either/or schematic that erases the subtler, yet still meaningful elements of their relationship. Thanks to Zelda Fitzgerald's growing interest in her writing career, the Fitzgeralds’ personal and artistic relationship developed through phases during their years together—from musedom to apprenticeship, then from collaboration to a more autonomous sense of individual artistic identities. F. Scott Fitzgerald's periodic resistance to his wife's development, I argue, was influenced not only by a desire to defend his artistic turf but also by the modernist ideology of the period that portrayed the professional artist as a masculine paragon who defended “true” literature against the feminized popular masses. By placing the Fitzgeralds’ artistic struggles within this historical context, we are able to get a fuller, more accurate view of the nature of their conflict, and we can use their case as a representative example through which to examine the gendered notions inherent in the ideology of artistic production at the time.

Near Vermeer: Edmund C. Tarbell's and John Sloan's Dutch Pictures

This article considers drawings and paintings made by the American artists Edmund Tarbell and John Sloan in relation to the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Claims about, interpretations of, and enthusiasm for ‘Dutch Pictures’ were prominent features of the transatlantic artworld in the years around 1900. Art critics, including George Moore, Charles Caffin, James Gibbons Huneker and Frank Jewett Mather, discussed the relationship between historical Dutch painting and contemporary art, while American collectors and museums purchased and displayed large numbers of paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and their contemporaries. The article connects specific seventeenth-century Dutch ideas and objects to such paintings as Tarbell's New England Interior (1906) and Sloan's Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910–11) and thinks more broadly about modern art's relationship to nationalism and to the past.

Rome, Trier, Kiev

The Egbert Psalter, also called the Gertrude Psalter, owes its two names not only to a change of ownership between the late-tenth and the mid-eleventh centuries, but also to the transformation of its textual and iconographical content. Polish Princess Gertrude indeed commissioned four Byzantine-style images to enrich the manuscript. These were made in Kiev either by local artists or foreign artists following the local style. This unexpected enrichment of the manuscript shows how an aristocratic laywoman was able to take ownership of a Psalter originally created for a bishop. It also attests to the intensity of the political, matrimonial, artistic and religious relationships between the western and eastern Christian realms despite the Great Schism of 1054. The Psalter’s history echoes the studies about cultural exchanges in Hans Belting’s Florence and Bagdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science.

И. А. Бунин и А. М. Федоров: к истории творческих отношений

И. А. Бунин и А. М. Федоров: к истории творческих отношений

Music’s Obedient Daughter ed. by Sabine Lichtenstein (review)

Reviewed by: Music’s Obedient Daughter ed. by Sabine Lichtenstein David Menzies Lichtenstein, Sabine (ed.) Music’s Obedient Daughter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Pp. 507. An astonishing range and breadth of essays are presented in this text, skillfully curated by Sabine Lichtenstein. The essays contained within hold thought-provoking examinations of the timeless relationship between text and music. Unique to these seventeen essays is a refreshing emphasis on the treatment of music and text on an equal footing—they all treat opera from a literary perspective, [End Page 221] that is, from a basis on the libretto. The essays demonstrate how many of of the greatest works of opera came from this understanding. We are reminded of somewhat tempestuous artistic relationships—beginning with Striggio and Monteverdi, to Mozart and Varesco, to Puccini and Illica and Giacosa. Some composers, such as Pfitzner and Wagner, chose to avoid this struggle and simply wrote their own libretti. The collection begins with Eddie Vetter’s “The Power of Music: Striggio and Montverdi’s L’Orfeo”, presenting the source of the libretto and the treatment of this by both composer and librettist. Jacques Boogaart’s “Octavia Reincarnated: Busenello’s and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea” explains how Monteverdi and Busenello manage the persona of Ottavia, providing an account of the first opera based on an historical character (9). Tim Carter’s “In the Operatic Workshop: The Case of Varesco’s and Mozart’s Idomeneo” investigates various mutations of the sources for the text, and presents an outline of librettist and composer collaboration. Caryl Clark’s “The Librettist’s Dilemma in London: Badini’s and Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice” reflects on the “conditions of possibility” portrayed in Badini’s libretto created for Haydn’s operatic debut in London (107). Irmlind Capelle’s “Hans Sachs—The Relation of Lortzing’s Opera to Deinhardtein’s Drama” demonstrates the challenges Lortzing faced by introducing new elements within the drama, while attending to the original drama. Heather Hadlock’s “Classical Parody and Burlesque in Orphée aux Enfers by Crémieux, Halévy and Offenbach” discusses modern French operetta and the origins of the libretto from the demi-monde of Paris. John Neubauer’s “Burning the Heretics and Saving Don Carlos: Méry’s, Du Locle’s and Verdi’s Don Carlos” presents the various sources of the libretto, from Saint-Réal to Schiller and examines how a writer may choose to deviate from historical sources in the advancement of drama (192). Katherine Syer’s “Tracing Wotan’s Incendiary Past: The Evolution of Storms and Fire in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen” considers the numerous changes that Wagner made to his libretto for the opera, highlighting the “process of reassignment and it’s far-reaching impact on the dramaturgy and the music of the Ring” (218). Vincent Giroud’s “Manon at the Opera: From Prévost’s Manon Lescaut to Auber’s Manon Lescaut and Massenet’s Manon” provides a study of the various incarnations of the Manon character throughout opera, drawn from Abbé Prévost’s original tale. Kasper van Kooten’s “Reflections on the Genesis and Dramaturgy of Illica’s, Giacosa’s and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly” focuses on Puccini’s divergent views from Illica’s and Giacosa’s libretto. Helga Hushahn’s “The End of a Line: Strauss’ and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra” presents a complex relationship between a composer and a librettist, one that resulted in one of the most intriguing operas of the twentieth century. Sabine Lichtenstein does double duty as editor and contributor in her stimulating [End Page 222] essay “Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Eine Musikalische Legende”, discussing the “stillness, mysticism and music” contained within this work (326). Loes Dommering-Van Rongen’s contribution in “The Musical Personality of Don Quixote: Manuel De Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro” introduces the genre of puppet opera and the textual influences commencing with the original Cervantes source. Michal Grover-Friedlander’s essay “Transformations of the Killing of a Boy: Weill’s and Brecht’s Der Jasager” examines the various mutations of the libretto, originating from a Japanese tale, and outlines the transformations this story takes over time. Ruth HaCohen’s “A...