Description
In 1670, an ordinance of Louis XIV criminalized self-destruction, decreeing that the corpses of suicides be desecrated and their property confiscated. And yet, beginning with Atys in 1676 (supposedly the king’s favourite), suicides were a regular feature of Parisian opera. Indeed, Polyxena’s bloody end by her own hand in Achille et Polixène (1688) seems to have inaugurated a trend to conclude operas abruptly with a death. Yet the ways in which characters end their lives reveal the tensions in contemporary debates on suicide: Is suicide a conscious act or one precipitated by madness? Is it sinful self-murder or rather the only power that mortals have against the gods? And in what situations might suicide be justifiable? This paper surveys the motivations and methods of self-immolation explored on the stage of the Paris Opéra in the decades around 1700. My principle argument is that the musical gestures employed served to mediate the experience of the suicide, revealing the mental state of the characters and ultimately the justifiability of the act.| Period | 20 Sept 2018 |
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| Event title | Operatic Workings of the Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Opera |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Oxford, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |