Books by Michael Wyatt
Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts for the Orlando Furioso, 2022
Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico... more Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) emerged from a world whose horizons were rapidly changing, and the poem presents itself as a prism through which to examine various links in the chain of interactions that characterized the Mediterranean region from late antiquity, through the medieval period, into early modernity, and beyond. The idea for this volume—and of the project from which it originated—takes its point of departure in Jorge Luis Borges’s celebrated short poem “Ariosto y los Arabes” (1960), which sees the Furioso as the hinge of a past and future literary culture that circulates between Europe and the Middle East. Protagonist of both historical conflict and cultural exchange, the Muslim “Saracen” represents the essential “Other” in Ariosto’s work, but the Orlando furioso also engages with the wider network of linguistic, political, and faith communities that defined the Mediterranean basin of its time. The sixteen contributions assembled here, produced by a diverse group of scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, consequently encompass several intertwined areas of analysis—philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance—in order to shed new light on the relational systems generated by and illustrative of Ariosto’s great poem.
Papers by Michael Wyatt
is a striking exception to Carolyn Abbate's insight that "in opera, the characters pacing the sta... more is a striking exception to Carolyn Abbate's insight that "in opera, the characters pacing the stage often suffer from deafness; they do not hear the music that is the ambient fluid of their music-drowned world." 1 Messiaen's characters are just the opposite: deeply connected and highly responsive to the organic sound world of a stage work that has often and dubiously been described as "unoperatic." The same charge has frequently been made of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and could easily be leveled at Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, both operas set to elusive texts by Maurice Maeterlinck and which Messiaen adored, repeatedly acknowledging them as models for his Saint François (he had discovered Pelléas while still a boy in Nantes, through his early teacher Jehan de Gibon, and Dukas was Messiaen's second professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire). Productions of Messiaen's opera-nine separate ones from 1983 through 2011, three of which also moved to other venues (to say nothing of numerous complete and partial concert performances), an astonishing record on the battleground of contemporary opera-stand or fall according to how seriously they take the challenges Saint François poses to the conventions of the operatic genre, not least of which is the composer's profoundly held religious belief. Messiaen himself recognized that, among a series of issues his oeuvre raises, "as a composer-believer, I speak of faith to atheists." 2 His impact on the postwar European avant-garde as the teacher of Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, and George Benjamin is well-trod ground, but Messiaen's own formation in the compositional and performance practices of the French post-Romantic organ school of Charles Tournemire, Charles-Marie Widor, and Marcel Dupré is less widely acknowledged (Maurice Duruflé and Jean Langlais were classmates of Messiaen's at the Conservatoire) and even less understood. The intersection in Messiaen's work of what might otherwise be seen as diametrically opposed ideologies and aesthetics still awaits a full-scale study, though Stephen Schloesser's Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 (University of Toronto Press, 2005) brilliantly maps the wider musical and religious world in which Messiaen's singular voice was formed. 3
Reviews by Michael Wyatt
Renaissance Quarterly, 2015
Reviews of my Work by Michael Wyatt
The editor's decision to frame the Renaissance between the war of the "Sicilian Vespers" in 1282 ... more The editor's decision to frame the Renaissance between the war of the "Sicilian Vespers" in 1282 and the execution of Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1600, results in identifying groundbreaking changes earlier than usually assumed, bringing for instance Dante into the equation as a precursor in valorizing classical models and using proto-Renaissance literary conventions (4), and considering the novelties brought about mostly be independent minds to have been significantly constrained by Catholic Orthodoxy at the end of the 17th century.
Conference Presentations by Michael Wyatt
Program for one-day conference in remembrance of Armando Petrucci at the Scuola Normale Superiore... more Program for one-day conference in remembrance of Armando Petrucci at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, October 15, 2021
Program for 'Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts of the Orlando Furioso', Villa I Tatti, Florence, Oc... more Program for 'Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts of the Orlando Furioso', Villa I Tatti, Florence, Oct 18-19, 2017
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Books by Michael Wyatt
Papers by Michael Wyatt
Reviews by Michael Wyatt
Reviews of my Work by Michael Wyatt
Conference Presentations by Michael Wyatt