0797fOrpheusEurydice_LuhrmannHudson

NOTES:

Hudson, Elizabeth. 2011. �Moulin Rouge! And the Boundaries of Opera� The Opera Quarterly 27:256-82.

256: the composer�s work: to rearticulate the familiar � repackage in various forms our experience of familiar musical texts.

257: [Luhrmann] reorient[s] our thinking about current modes of operatic performance

257: �the musical is back�� the film set out to reinvent the genre of the Hollywood film musical

258: Moonstruck as Boh�me with listing of overt references, i.e. wooden/cold hand � che gelida manina

259: Luhrmann�s posed question/problem �of the technologically mediated representation of the subject in cinema and music that MR sets out to explore�

260: Luhrmann engages the audience on operatic terms, i.e. non-realistic singing

            Plot drawn from Boh�me, Traviata, and �

The Orpheus myth  (synopsized pp. 260-61)

                              IS IT REALLY HERE? OR just PERCEIVED by Hudson?

                              References or Inferences?

            For Luhrmann the representation of Orpheus� song was the essential dilemma of the film�

            Thus: �Can opera � or the emotional immediacy of operatic song as a tool for engaging with the subjects and stories of a narrative text� be refigured through film today?�

262-63: I may get a little bit lost tracing �the operatic� mode

266: �� in MR! musical performance becomes the focus. Through refiguring the myth of Orpheus, the concept of voice in technological reproduction is thematized, contested, and debated. And the terms of Orpheus�s representation simultaneously highly the dilemma and pose a solution: for by setting up Orpheus�s song as immediately recognizable quotations from a panoply of rock/pop stars, the source of emotional response is signaled as not residing in the cinematic text, but rther in the act of reception.�

            �Orpheus� authorial voice = quotations�

=277: emotional/musical memory [is] created through the very experience of watching the film. Thus the terms of the myth of Orpheus have been refigured in twenty-first century terms. �

     �What Luhrmann achieves, I believe, is the reconstitution of Orpheus/opera in cinematic terms, in which at least a partially subjective musical expression relying on personal effective memory is recaptured as possible through � the tools of mechanical reproduction.�

   278: �Love, connection, and emotional expression can be discovered in the Moulin Rouge � and in mediatized representations of operatic performance.�

The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.