Gabriela Cruz
· Chair of Musicology and Glenn McGeoch Collegiate Professor of MusicVerifiedUniversity of Michigan · Department of Musicology
Active 1999–2024
About
Gabriela Cruz is a music historian whose research interests lie at the intersection of the study of opera, theater, technology, aesthetics, and politics. She joined the University of Michigan in 2012 after teaching at Tufts University, the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and the Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal. Cruz’s most recent book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the transformation of opera into a modern art of spectacle facilitated by the introduction of gas illumination and the development of visual and musical technologies of illusion, such as phantasmagoria and the diorama, in opera theaters beginning in the 1820s. Her essays and review essays on operetta, the theater of Verdi, Wagner, and Meyerbeer, French grand opera, romantic aesthetics, early phonography, and Portuguese film have appeared in various academic journals and edited volumes. In addition to her work on opera and technology, Cruz is currently pursuing a project on musical comedy in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, investigating the intersections of theatre, music, and politics in modern culture. She serves as Chair of the Musicology Department at the University of Michigan and teaches courses on opera, art-song, the history of Western music, the musics of Iberia and Latin America, music and mediality, aesthetics, and comedy.
Research topics
- Art
- Art history
- Psychology
- Linguistics
- Philosophy
- Visual arts
- History
- Management
- Literature
- Cognitive psychology
- Ancient history
Selected publications
Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana · 2024-12-19
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingentramado histrico-cultural an no ha sido suficientemente explorado por los musiclogos, una laguna que el presente estudio subsana.
Lisboa, terra dos sorrisos (1938-45): A ópera e a opereta sob a alçada totalitária
Revista portuguesa de musicologia · 2021-11-09 · 1 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingEntre 1934 e 1946, a atividade operática em Lisboa é residual e, em consequência, o futuro da arte lírica decide-se fora do Teatro de São Carlos. Esta é a história que nos ocupa aqui, pois enuncia um momento de viragem na vida da instituição. A vida operática em Lisboa a partir dos anos quarenta cristaliza uma nova ideia da arte que passa por ser de fidelidade à tradição da ópera e da casa, mas que prima por uma constelação de valores e comportamentos que são novos ao teatro e sedimentam nele o interesse totalitário. Este ensaio reflete sobre a história do teatro cantado em Lisboa e considera a forma como a ópera e a opereta se articulam no sentido de coadjuvar o projeto totalitário durante o período do Estado Novo. Em paralelo, o ensaio investiga também as vertentes irregulares da vida quotidiana e artística da cidade e considera o valor político que a teatralidade, elemento fundamental do arsenal técnico do ator e do cantor, acrescenta à vivência do teatro cantado regida pela regra e hábito autoritário. A centralidade do ator-cantor na história do teatro cantado no século XX e a importância da improvisação como elemento de resistência política investigam-se aqui com recurso ao espólio do tenor Tomás Alcaide, depositado no Museu Nacional da Música em Lisboa.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020-03-11
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe complexities of opera’s entanglement with the physical world is the subject of Mary Ann Smart’s latest book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Bodies are, of course, central to the experience of opera, but they have only recently begun to attract serious scholarly interest. Mimomania tells a particular history of the body in opera, one only marginally concerned with actual scenes of performance or real singers on stage. This is the story of the body as musical signifier or of the peculiar composerly obsession with putting flesh to music. Mimomania is not a history of mélodrame. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1770) receives no mention here, and this book is also the wrong place to look for a narrative of the genre’s subsequent history. The book is, instead, the first sustained and unembarrassed contemplation f the melodramatic logic that underwrites the history of nineteenth-century opera.
2020-09-03
other1st authorCorrespondingSubject Opera Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
<i>Aida</i>, Egyptomania, and the After-life of Grand Opera
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Art
- Literature
- Art history
Abstract This chapter explores three related themes present in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida: the nexus between the imaginative display of the flute and the wider nineteenth-century fascination with ancient Egypt; Verdi’s turn to the affective poetics of phantasmagoria—its focus on loss, mourning and consolation—as he mobilized grand opera for the project of empire in the 1870s; and finally, his timely consideration of the lyrical voice of Aida, which calls attention to the role of memory in listening to opera and comments on the spectral nature of grand opera, suggesting that it survives in operatic modernity as a musical after-image, that is, a trace of a past musicality that potentiates the critical awareness of opera today.
The Poetics of Sensation in <i>L’Africaine</i> and <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>
2020-08-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with pleasure and innervation that the two composers shared during the late 1850s and 60s. The music dramaturgies of Wagner and Meyerbeer centered on exotic tress and poisonous blossoms are discussed in parallel, not to show, as others have done, what Wagner learned from Meyerbeer and improved upon, but rather to draw attention to the works’ shared preoccupation with enhanced perception and the role of dreamlike experience in the theater. This shared preoccupation is considered in light of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity.
The Diorama, Apparitions, and Dream Image in <i>Robert le diable</i>
2020-08-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead left their graves, and, phantom-like, haunted the stage. Those “ghosts” of deceased nuns clad in white ushered in a new genre, the ballet blanc, while another phantom—Robert’s mother—bestowed on grand opera the gift of lyric spectrality when Alice, in Act V, relayed the woman’s last words. Parisian mélomanes regarded this moment of song with special reverence after the 1830s and, arguably, its lyrical qualities guided efforts to reform singing in the 1830s and 40s. But, at the same time, Robert ushered in a new understanding in Paris of opera as an art of dream-like states: indeed, it was the visual procedures of phantasmagoria and diorama that inspired the radical change in Meyerbeer’s art of composition.
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Art
- Visual arts
- Art history
Abstract Beginning in the 1820s, grand opera developed into a new artistic medium for the delivery of historical spectacles which, in turn, afforded audiences a new way of seeing and hearing the past. Afterwards, grand operatic spectacles fetischized the past while obfuscating the crisis of memory brought about by the 1789 revolution. They became vehicles for remembrance, relying on which Charles Baudelaire would later describe as a mnemotechnics. Jacques Fromental Halévy’s Derniers mémoirs et souvenirs (1863) provides us with a roadmap for reading opera as a medium of memory. Pursing a memnotechnical sense of grand opera, I investigate the introduction of new visual and musical technologies (gaslight illumination, the diorama, orchestration and singing) at the Opéra, and consider the role played by these technologies in shoring up the central concern with memory in grand opera.
2020-08-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris after the 1820s. Parisian mélomanes wrote imaginatively and at length about opera, leaving for posterity a treasure trove of “souvenirs.” When contemplating the idea of beauty in the contemporary opera stage, these recollections often revisited a single musical event led by Henriette Sontag and Maria Malibran in 1829, which, they claimed, bequeathed to them something extraordinary: a new lyrical mood, at once blissful and discontented, which ushered into opera the divided affect of modernity. Théophile Gautier elaborated on this divided affect a few times in his poetry and in the process, he invented the figure of the diva, the allegory of beauty.
Gaslight and Phantasmagoria at the Opéra
2020-08-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Phantasmagoric, evanescent figurations began competing for attention on the operatic stage following the introduction of gas lighting to the Salle Le Peletier in 1822. Gaslight provided a new environment for the creation of optical illusions in the theater, introducing darkness as a dramaturgical means of facilitating dreamlike perceptivity. In this environment, opera was re-mediated in light of phantasmagoria, the eighteenth-century art of conjuring ghosts developed by Paul Philidor and Etienne Robertson, to become a medium for the production of illusions. Louis Daguerre deployed his new art of the diorama at the Opéra beginning in the 1820s.
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Sara Pacchiarotti
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