Document Type
Doctoral Thesis
Disciplines
6.4 ART, 6.5 OTHER HUMANITIES
Abstract
This thesis examines the convergence of the fin-de-siècle revival of Greek antiquity and the denigration of women brought on by the patriarchal structures of the Second Empire and the Third Republic in five works composed by Camille Saint-Saëns between 1870 and 1910: Omphale, Phryné, Antigone, Hélène, and Déjanire. Its main purpose is to reveal the compositional strategies he devised in order to effectively give each of these title characters the musical upper hand over their male counterparts. That these five works were significant landmarks in his exceptionally long career is attested by the numerous articles he published around the time of their Parisian premieres, as well as the voluminous correspondence relative to their geneses. While there is no easy way of apprehending the ‘discursive network’ (Rieger) of influences and constraints that paved the way for these strategies, his outpourings over the same period at least provide some insight as to their aesthetic (essentially classicist) and cultural (essentially Wagnerian) currency — a paradoxical blend that has fascinated and perplexed contemporary musicologists in equal measure. Hidden from the public, his inner being is no less critical to an evaluation of what American psychologist Kenneth Ring termed his ‘woman complex’, a concept lucidly described by Saint-Saëns himself as an ‘incurable disease’. Ultimately, this thesis aims to probe the manifestations of this complex through the portrayal of these archetypal women, a task both facilitated and challenged by their grouping into a single study.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/bmrz-za56
Recommended Citation
Rao, Arun, "Omphale, Phryné, Antigone, Hélène, Déjanire: ‘le sexe faible’ in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Greece-Inspired Works" (2024). Doctoral. 119.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/appadoc/119
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Publication Details
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Technological University Dublin, 2024.
doi:10.21427/bmrz-za56