Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton Studies in Opera) By Gary Tomli

Metaphysical SongAn Essay on Opera\nAuthor(s): Gary Tomlinson\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Princeton University Press, United States\nImprint: Princeton University Press\nISBN-13: 9780691004099, 978-0691004099\nSynopsis\nIn this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the pa.