{"id":514,"date":"2018-07-18T11:45:47","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T16:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/?p=514"},"modified":"2018-07-19T10:21:29","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T15:21:29","slug":"van-rij-inge-there-is-no-anachronism-indian-dancing-girls-in-ancient-carthage-in-in-berliozs-les-troyens-19th-century-music-vol-33-no-1-2009-pp-3-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/?p=514","title":{"rendered":"Van Rij, Inge. \u201cThere Is No Anachronism: Indian Dancing Girls in Ancient Carthage in in Berlioz\u2019s Les Troyens.\u201d 19th Century Music, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2009, pp. 3-24."},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

“\u2026. While various authors make connections between Indian and Egyptian music and dance, none go quite so far as to place bayad\u00e8res in the Carthage of Didon\u2019s time. If Berlioz really wanted to avoid anachronism, he should, to use his own words, have \u201c\u00e9tudi\u00e9 la question\u201d and \u201cgone into it\u201d further. But authenticity was presumably not Berlioz\u2019s primary objective. In conceiving the ballets to be performed in Didon\u2019s Carthage, he surely did not begin with historical accounts of the ancient world, for his first impulse was to emulate the bayad\u00e8res he had seen in Paris sixteen or seventeen years earlier. Similarly, my concern here is not with ancient Indian dance rituals or the Carthaginian slave trade. Rather, I will pursue the relationship between Berlioz\u2019s dances and his contemporary models\u2014an investigation that nevertheless must deal with the same questions of authenticity and anachronism.<\/p>\n

Authenticity and anachronism are, of course, two of the fundamental issues of exoticism, and in negotiating the gap between Indian temple and French theater, between ancient Carthage and contemporary Europe, or, more broadly, between historical\/anthropological veracity and operatic convention, Berlioz is engaging in a discourse very familiar in the nineteenth century. As recent studies of musical exoticism have ably demonstrated, this dis-course typically tended to privilege the second party in each of the above pairings\u2014i.e., nineteenth-century European operatic convention\u2014 for exoticism inevitably reflects the host culture more than the culture supposedly being depicted.<\/p>\n

In this context, Berlioz\u2019s bayad\u00e8res could be seen as almost a textbook case of exoticism. The distinction between the two sides of the traditional oppositional pairings is heightened, for we have an instance of real bayad\u00e8res encountered in the flesh by a composer who persistently proved resistant to the charms of genuine exotic music, and whose musical exoticism has been memorably described as \u201cnugatory\u201d\u2014with the potent but rare exception of the act IV ballet itself. Rather than simply dismissing Berlioz\u2019s ballet as mere exoticism I will explore the tension of this dialectic, for such an exploration enriches our understanding of Les Troyens <\/em>and informs our responses to modern productions of Berlioz\u2019s opera\u2014productions whose aesthetics reconfigure in interesting ways the issues of authenticity and anachronism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Introduction “\u2026. While various authors make connections between Indian and Egyptian music and dance, none go quite so far as to place bayad\u00e8res in the Carthage of Didon\u2019s time. If Berlioz really wanted to avoid anachronism, he should, to use his own words, have \u201c\u00e9tudi\u00e9 la question\u201d and \u201cgone into it\u201d further. But Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[83,82],"tags":[93,94,23,88],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-history-dance","tag-bayaderes","tag-courtesans","tag-history","tag-music"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}