Lily Kass
I study issues of translation in both historical and contemporary opera performance. My dissertation, "Translating, Adapting, and Performing Opera in Cosmopolitan Europe: Lorenzo Da Ponte's Libretto Translations on the London Stage," examines the integral role that translation has played in opera history and that it continues to play in adapting works to new audiences and mediating between disparate places, times, and cultures. My focus is on opera translation in the context of late 18th-century London, but the core ideas in my work easily extend out from that specific setting and period. In my dissertation, I present an in-depth study of four operas, Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Monsigny’s La Belle Arsène, Grétry’s Zémire et Azor, and Sacchini’s Arvire et Évélina, which were originally performed in French in Paris in the 1780s. They all subsequently appeared at London’s Italian opera house, the King’s Theatre, in the 1790s in Italian translations attributed to Lorenzo Da Ponte. In exploring these case studies through close analyses of printed and manuscript scores and libretti, documents from the theater, and Da Ponte’s own writings, I shed light on the circulation of music, texts, people, and ideas in Europe in the highly-charged years surrounding the French Revolution. By unlocking the potential of translation as a historical and cultural agent, my dissertation contributes to scholarship on issues such as cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and authorship.
Supervisors: Mauro Calcagno, Emily Dolan, and Jeffrey Kallberg
Address: https://lilykassphd.com/
Supervisors: Mauro Calcagno, Emily Dolan, and Jeffrey Kallberg
Address: https://lilykassphd.com/
less
InterestsView All (15)
Uploads
Book Chapters by Lily Kass
Articles by Lily Kass
Conference Presentations by Lily Kass
Reviews by Lily Kass
Public Musicology by Lily Kass
Book Reviews by Lily Kass
Courses by Lily Kass
Papers by Lily Kass