A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Andrea Fabry discusses in her article, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle," the image of Bluebeard as a metaphor for gender relations. Bela Bartok's opera and its libretto represent a prime example of the metaphor that in turn can be found in a range of text types, from fairy tales through novels to films. In the article, Fabry analyzes Bartok's contribution to the metaphor, namely with his opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle. She relates the opera to the text of the opera's libretto, written by film theoretician Bela Balazs, and places her analysis in the larger historical framework of audience research in modernity. The analysis reveals that in a pronounced misogynistic artistic climate of the time and working from a libretto whose tragic ending denies transcendence to the female character of the opera, Bartok's opera can be understood as the representation of simplistic domesticity where the real story remains un-mediated and unnarrated. Andrea Fabry, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.4 (1999):
Culture and musical hermeneutics: The Salome complex
From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.
A botanical biography of Professor Paul Richards C.B.E.
AbstractPaul Westmacott Richards (19 December 1908–4 October 1995) was for 75 years a member of ‘the Society’ (the Moss Exchange Club, MEC, later to become the British Bryological Society, BBS) and was, by some very considerable margin, its longest standing member (Figs 1–4). He was President of the BBS on two occasions (1950–51 and 1978–79), an office that no one else has held twice. He was elected an Honorary Member in 1970. From 1949 until 1976 he was Professor of Botany at the University College of North Wales (now University of Wales, Bangor).