About the Speaker: Gabriela Cruz teaches music history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her recent book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Oxford, 2020), explores the technologies of illusion and illumination behind grand opera's rise to cultural eminence in nineteenth-century Europe. She is currently investigating the political cultures of comedy on the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century stage.
“In The Land of Smiles: Ideology, Theatricality and Responsibility in the Totalitarian Stage”
About the Talk: This paper considers the racialized logic of Franz Lehár´s last operetta Das Land des Lächelns (1929), teasing the outward pleasantness of the work apart from the protocols of racial hate which underwrite its spectacle and lend to it its unique affect. Surprisingly, the very existence and theatrical coherence of these protocols has escaped musicological comment thus far. Yet, my purpose here is not to denounce the work but to consider what we might learn from Land about the upending of operetta by the project of fascism. The paper lays out the spectacular mechanisms of oppression before it considers the work of actors and directors, and their recourse to theatricality as a means to destabilize the totalitarian mechanism. I shall highlight the strategies employed by film director Max Reichmann in Berlin 1930 and by Portuguese tenor Tomás Alcaide in Paris in 1939 as they staged and performed Lehár’s last work.
Music colloquia provide a weekly forum for presentation and discussion on recent research by distinguished visitors and CWRU faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.
All talks take place in Harkness Chapel Classroom, Fridays at 4 PM (unless otherwise indicated). The series is free and open to the public.