Voltaire's "Racine": the paradoxes of a transformation

This article highlights some paradoxical aspects of Voltaire's admiration for Racine. He paid little attention to Racine's plays as dramatic entities, followed received opinions, and made many unfavourable judgements, especially concerning Racine's mix of tragedy and galanterie. What he idolized was Racine's use of language and his poetic skill. He thus removed Racine's tragedies from the contingencies of the theatre, and transformed them into an eighteenth-century linguistic and cultural ideal that he used for polemical purposes in a war against Shakespeare and encroaching barbarism, leading the Romantics subsequently to reject the `Racine' he had been so influential in creating

Chance in the tragedies of Racine

In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France

(Dis)embodying myths in ancien régime opera: multidisciplinary perspectives

Throughout the Ancien Régime, mythology played a remarkably vital role in opera, defining such epoch-making works as Claudio Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo (1607) and Christoph Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). The operatic presence of the Greco-Roman gods and heroes was anything but unambiguous or unproblematic, however. (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera highlights myth’s chameleonic life in the Italian dramma per musica and French tragédie en musique of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Written by eminent scholars in the fields of music, literature, theater, and cultural studies, the six essays in this book address important questions. Through what ideological lenses did the Ancien Régime perceive an ancient legacy that was fundamentally pagan and fictitious, as opposed to Christian and rationalistic? What dramaturgies did librettists and composers devise to adapt mythical topics to altering philosophical and esthetic doctrines? Were the ancients’ precepts obeyed or precisely overridden by the age of ‘classicism’? And how could myths be made to fit changing modes of spectatorship? Enlightening and wide-ranging on an essentially multidisciplinary development in European culture, (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera will appeal to all music, literature and art lovers seeking to deepen their knowledge of an increasingly popular repertoire

Iphigénie en Tauried. By Christoph Willibald Gluck. Glimmerglass Opera, Cooperstown, New York. 19 August 1997

Iphigénie en Tauried. By Christoph Willibald Gluck. Glimmerglass Opera, Cooperstown, New York. 19 August 199

Music and Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide as Dramatic Tableau

This article puts forward a new theory for discussing eighteenth-century music as narrative by combining literary theories of narrative with an analytical and historical exploration of the eighteenth-century opera overture. Through a consideration of how the overture to Iphigénie en Aulide prepares spectators for the ensuing drama and through a reconsideration of the role of (often ignored) devices such as musical repetition, this article shows how theories of theatre, drama, and narrative can inform our understanding of how music can be thought of in narrative terms and how eighteenth-century music was able to express a dramatic argument akin to that of a literary narrative. A hermeneutic approach is taken throughout that combines a (structuralist) analysis of the overture with a (poststructuralist) investigation into the overture’s reception history and of eighteenth-century literary and dramatic theory. By proposing that music has a narrative potential, rather than an explicit structural narrative, the article seeks to provide a theoretical bedrock for future studies that place the ‘reader’ or listener as participant

Une approche floue pour la détermination de la région d'influence d'une station hydrométrique

La notion d'appartenance partielle d'une station hydrométrique à une région hydrologique est modélisée par une fonction d'appartenance obtenue en appliquant les concepts de l'analyse floue. Les stations hydrométriques sont représentées dans des plans dont les axes sont des attributs hydrologiques et/ou physiographiques. Les régions hydrologiques sont considérées comme des sous-ensembles flous. Une méthode d'agrégation par cohérence (Iphigénie) permet d'établir des classes d'équivalence pour la relation floue "il n'y a pas d'incohérence entre les éléments d'une même classe": ce sont des classes d'équivalence qui représentent les régions floues. La fonction d'appartenance dans ce cas est stricte. Par opposition, la seconde méthode de type centres mobiles flous (ISODATA) permet d'attribuer un degré d'appartenance d'une station à une région floue dans l'intervalle [0,1]. Celle-ci reflète le degré d'appartenance de la station à un groupe donné (le nombre de groupes étant préalablement choisi de façon heuristique). Pour le cas traité (réseau hydrométrique tunisien, débits maximums annuels de crue), il s'avère cependant que le caractère flou des stations n'est pas très prononcé. Sur la base des agrégats obtenus par la méthode Iphigénie et des régions floues obtenues par ISODATA, est effectuée une estimation régionale des débits maximums de crue de période de retour 100 ans. Celle-ci est ensuite comparée à l'estimation régionale obtenue par la méthode de la région d'influence ainsi qu'à l'estimation utilisant les seules données du site, sous l'hypothèse que les populations parentes sont des lois Gamma à deux paramètres et Pareto à trois paramètres.The concept of partial membership of a hydrometric station in a hydrologic region is modeled using fuzzy sets theory. Hydrometric stations are represented in spaces of hydrologic (coefficient of variation: CV, coefficient of skewness: CS, and their counterparts based on L- moments: L-CV and L-CS) and/or physiographic attributes (surface of watershed: S, specific flow: Qs=Qmoyen/S, and a shape index: Ic). Two fuzzy clustering methods are considered.First a clustering method by coherence (Iphigénie) is considered. It is based on the principle of transitivity: if two pairs of stations (A,B) and (B,C) are known to be "close" to one another, then it is incoherent to state that A is "far" from C. Using a Euclidean distance, all pairs of stations are sorted from the closest pairs to the farthest. Then, the pairs of stations starting and ending this list are removed and classified respectively as "close" and "far". The process is then continued until an incoherence is detected. Clusters of stations are then determined from the graph of "close" stations. A disadvantage of Iphigénie is that crisp (non fuzzy) membership functions are obtained.A second method of clustering is considered (ISODATA), which consists of minimizing fuzziness of clusters as measured by an objective function, and which can assign any degree of membership between 0 to 1 to a station to reflect its partial membership in a hydrologic region. It is a generalization of the classical method of mobile centers, in which crisp clusters minimizing entropy are obtained. When using Iphigénie, the number of clusters is determined automatically by the method, but for ISODATA it must be determined beforehand.An application of both methods of clustering to the Tunisian hydrometric network (which consists of 39 stations, see Figure 1) is considered, with the objective of obtaining regional estimates of the flood frequency curves. Four planes are considered: P1: (Qs,CV), P2: (CS,CV), P3: (L-CS,L-CV), and P4: (S,Ic), based on a correlation study of the available variables (Table 1).Figures 2, 3a, 4 and 5 show the clusters obtained using Iphigénie for planes P1 through P4. Estimates of skewness (CS) being quite biased and variable for small sample sizes, it was decided to determine the influence of sample size in the clusters obtained for P2. Figure 3b shows the clusters obtained when the network is restricted to the 20 stations of the network for which at least 20 observations of maximum annual flood are available. Fewer clusters are obtained than in Figure 3, but it can be observed that the structure is the same: additional clusters appearing in Figure 3 may be obtained by breaking up certain large clusters of Figure 3b. In Figure 3c, the sample size of each of the 39 stations of the network is plotted in the plane (CS,CV), to see if extreme estimated values of CS and CV were caused by small samples. This does not seem to be the case, since many of the most extreme points correspond to long series.ISODATA was also applied to the network. Based on entropy criteria (Table 2, Figures 6a and 6b), the number of clusters for ISODATA was set to 4. It turns out that the groups obtained using ISODATA are not very fuzzy. The fuzzy groups determined by ISODATA are generally conditioned by only one variable, as shown by Figures 7a-7d, which respectively show the fuzzy clusters obtained for planes P1-P4. Only lines of iso-membership of level 0.9 were plotted to facilitate the analysis. For hydrologic spaces (P2 and P3), it is skewness (CS and L-CS) and for physiographic spaces (P1 and P4) it is surface (Qs and S). Regionalization of the 100-year return period flood is performed based on the homogeneous groups obtained (using an index-flood method), and compared to the well-known region of influence (ROI) approach, both under the hypothesis of a 2-parameter Gamma distribution and a 3-parameter Pareto distribution. For the ROI approach, the threshold corresponding to the size of the ROI of a station is taken to be the distance at which an incoherence first appeared when applying Iphigénie. Correlation of the regional estimate with a local estimation for space P1 is 0.91 for Iphigénie and 0.85 both for ISODATA and the ROI approach. Relative bias of regional estimates of the 100-year flood based on P1 is plotted on Figures 9 (Gamma distribution) and Figure 10 (Pareto distribution). The three methods considered give similar results for a Gamma distribution, but Iphigénie estimates are less biased when a Pareto distribution is used. Thus Iphigénie appears superior, in this case, to ISODATA and ROI. Values of bias and standard error for all four planes are given for Iphigénie in Table 3.Application of an index-flood regionalization approach at ungauged sites requires the estimation of mean flow (also called the flood index) from physiographic attributes. A regression study shows that the best explanatory variables are watershed surface S, the shape index Ic and the average slope of the river. In Figure 8, the observed flood index is plotted against the flood index obtained by regression. The correlation coefficient is 0.93.Iphigénie and ISODATA could also be used in conjunction with other regionalization methods. For example, when using the ROI approach, it is necessary to, quite arbitrarily, determine the ROI threshold. It has been shown that this is a byproduct of the use of Iphigénie. ISODATA is most useful for pattern identification when the data is very fuzzy, unlike the example considered in this paper. But even in the case of the Tunisian network, its application gives indications as to which variables (skewness and surface) are most useful for clustering

Translating, Adapting, And Performing Opera In Eighteenth-Century Cosmopolitan Europe: Lorenzo Da Ponte At The King\u27s Theatre

This dissertation examines music and text circulation in cosmopolitan Europe during the last decades of the eighteenth century through the lens of translation. London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the largest center of Italian operatic performance outside of Italy. All performances sung at the King’s Theatre, London, were sung in Italian, the presumed language of opera, even when the works had been originated in other languages. This created the need for a culture of translation and adaptation of works from abroad, making them suitable for a London audience partially through the retention of foreignness and partially through domesticating practices. In the 1790s, a period of political tension between Britain and post-Revolution France, four French operas were presented at the King\u27s Theatre in Italian translations attributed to the poet Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838): Gluck\u27s Iphig�nie en Tauride, Gr�try\u27s Z�mire et Azor, Monsigny\u27s La belle Ars�ne, and Sacchini\u27s Arvire et �v�lina. A quintessentially cosmopolitan man who was never stationary for long, Da Ponte served as the house poet for the King’s Theatre in London from 1792 to 1799 and then again from 1801 to 1805. A large portion of Da Ponte’s job at the King’s Theatre involved utilizing his knowledge of languages and of audience taste to adapt and translate preexisting works for the London stage. This historically grounded, theoretically informed, and performance-oriented examination of Da Ponte’s four translations as sung at the King’s Theatre investigates a world in which translation was a necessary part of daily life in cosmopolitan centers as well as an often overlooked but integral aspect of artistic processes in opera houses

Secular Dreams, Bloody Oracles: Staging State and Religion in Classical Athens and Enlightenment Paris

I perform a comparative reading of Iphigeneia Among the Taurians by Euripides (around 414 BCE) and the adaptation Iphigénie en Tauride by Claude Guimond de La Touche (1757 CE). I aim to read the development of the secular with regards to state and religion as it became articulated in the Athens of Euripides and later adapted on the French stage during the Enlightenment. I briefly include some observations on contemporary claims about the separation of church and state in the United States to deepen my comparative reading about the development of the secular as I define it in this thesis