Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Kristin Franseen, Margaret Cormier (McGill)
The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.
Students (Music) for whom attendance is required must sign the attendance sheet at the colloquium.
Can You Recall No Melody of Mine?: Musical and Historical Memory in Fictional Depictions of Antonio Salieri’s Later Life
Kristin Franssen
The most popular fictional depictions of Antonio Salieri—from Pushkin’s “little tragedy” Mozart and Salieri to Shaffer’s wildly successful Amadeus (and the Oscar-winning film adaptation)—focus on his imagined rivalry with Mozart. Pushkin’s drama is condensed into less than a day, with a series of meditations on the nature of art and genius culminating in Mozart’s murder. In both play and screenplay, Shaffer skips from 1791 (Mozart’s death) to 1823 (Salieri’s hospitalization for complications from what we would term dementia).
This presentation explores the concepts of musical and historical memory as interconnected within novels about Salieri. His career after Mozart—including his teaching of Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt and continued active presence in Viennese musical life—seem to present problems for musical novelists. Fiction that takes the “rivalry” with Mozart at face-value, including Franz Farga’s Salieri und Mozart, David Weiss’s The Assassination of Mozart, and Cedric Glover’s The Mysterious Barricades (among others), tends to either minimize or demonize his pedagogical career to varying degrees. Even more recent sympathetic works like Dieter Kühn’s Ein Mozart in Galizien and Ian Kyer’s Damaging Winds grapple with the apparent divide between Salieri’s documented influence on more canonical Romantic figures and his music’s disappearance from the repertoire. Kühn’s novel is unique among fictional depictions of Salieri for focusing on a non-canonical composer—Franz Xavier Wolfgang Mozart—and explicitly foregrounding anxieties about historical legacy and influence. I take Kühn’s notion of “resonance” more broadly to explore the fictional act of musical remembering and forgetting across musical fiction.
Kristin Franseen is a part-time professor of musicology at the University of Ottawa, as well as a freelance editor and tutor living in Montreal. Her dissertation, “Ghosts in the Archives: The Queer Knowledge and Public Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson,” was completed at McGill University in 2019 under the supervision of Lloyd Whitesell. She is currently developing a new project on gossip, anecdote, conspiracy theories, and other “informal sources” in musicology and musicological fiction.
The Seraglio as Brothel: Staging Sexual Violence in Calixto Bieito’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Margaret Cormier
My dissertation explores contemporary performance practice around representing sexual violence on the operatic stage. Focusing on twenty-first century productions of canonic operas, I consider how the staging of sexual violence affects the stories these operas tell, and the ways those stories resonate with present-day audiences in their cultural contexts. Ultimately, I am interested in the cultural work these representations do, how they function, and what is at stake when we put rape onstage.
This talk narrows in on Calixto Bieito’s infamous 2004 production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. My analysis operates at two levels: the agency of the female characters victimized by sexual violence within the work; and the aesthetic/dramatic choices made by the production team in putting acts of sexual violence onstage. By setting his Entführung in a contemporary European brothel, Bieito’s production also brings the politics of representing sex work and sex trafficking to the fore.
Margaret Cormier is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Schulich School of Music. In addition to writing her dissertation, “Staging Sexual Violence in the Operatic Canon,” Margaret has been giving pre-performance chats for a number of opera companies in Toronto. She recently organized a series of panel discussions associated with the inaugural concert series for Amplified Opera, a new initiative in Toronto dedicated to platforming the voices of artists who have been historically excluded from opera.
