Please join us April 4th at 2 pm PST for a virtual talk by Prof. Gabriela Cruz (U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor): "Magic lantern: seeing far, seeing self and other delights in Méliès’s Lanterne Magique, Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann".The stupendous impact of the magic lantern, the early technology for producing spectacles of moving images, on the imaginative labors of the romantic generation, especially when these return us to the domain of the ocular, of seeing and gazing, has long been recognized in scholarship. Less understood is the mobilization of the apparatus for reimagining voice, singing and song during the 19th-century. This presentation takes its point of departure from an eccentric assemblage of scenes  from silent film, narrative, song and opera, read in kaleidoscopic manner for traces of sound and for the sense of how the lantern may be said to have constituted the scene of romantic listening.

 

Profssor Gabriela Cruz teaches music history and the history of opera at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her interests lie at the intersection of the histories of visual and sonic technologies, opera, theater and performance studies and her recent book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera (OUP, 2020), addresses the constitutive roles which technologies of illumination and illusion played in transforming the medium of opera during the Nineteenth-Century. She is currently working on a new book on music and comedy.