Graduate Scholar Talk - January 27, 2021

Singing Nuns, Libertine Parody, and the Aesthetics of French Revolutionary Opera

Speaker: Callum John Blackmore, Music Department 

The French Revolution launched a trend for operas, plays, and parodies involving Revolutionary forces rescuing young women from corrupt or tyrannical nuns and monks. It has been widely assumed that these operas capitalized on the anti-clerical sentiments which emerged as a key political force during the Revolution.

Blackmore seeks to challenge this assumption: he argues that these works emerged as sites of aesthetic and political circumspection, demonstrating that the connections between operatic representation and Revolutionary legislation were not always straightforward. 

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