@article{1479417,
      recid = {1479417},
      author = {Hutcheon, Linda,  and Hutcheon, Michael, },
      title = {Opera : The Art of Dying /},
      pages = {1 online resource (239 p.) :},
      abstract = {Our modern narratives of science and technology can only  go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all  finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of  opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art  form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this  provocative work suggests? In Opera: The Art of Dying a  physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific  and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and  dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art  imparts. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera  to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy  in the medieval custom of contemplatio mortis--a dramatized  exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for  the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that  remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience,  they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the  common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror  of death (in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites); the  longing for death (in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde);  preparation for the good death (in Wagner's Ring of the  Nibelung); and suicide (in Puccini's Madama Butterfly). In  works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others,  the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and  even right morally, psychologically, and artistically--how,  in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give  life meaning.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1479417},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674335639},
}