Exoticism in Operatic Depiction of the Frontier West

Daly, David Selwyn

Exoticism in Operatic Depiction of the Frontier West

dc.contributor.advisor	DeLong, Kenneth Gordon
dc.contributor.author	Daly, David Selwyn
dc.contributor.committeemember	DeLong, Kenneth Gordon
dc.contributor.committeemember	Welling, Miriam Joelle
dc.contributor.committeemember	Ellis, James R.
dc.date	2024-02
dc.date.accessioned	2023-12-15T23:42:11Z
dc.date.available	2023-12-15T23:42:11Z
dc.date.issued	2023-12-15
dc.description.abstract	When Giacomo Puccini debuted his La fanciulla del West at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1910, he began the serious operatic engagement of the frontier West. Yet over a century since, the frontier West is a narrative space that has been engaged only sporadically by American and Canadian composers alike. Music drama of the frontier represents a niche corner of twentieth- and twenty-first century opera, one with compositional characteristics that distinguish it from other post-nineteenth century opera. The frontier West is both actual historiographic entity and imagistic concept. With the end of an actual frontier line in 1880, its recession into history brought recounting of memories from actual lived experiences, tainted and coloured by the passage of time and mixed together with artistically licenced renditions. Depictions of the West beginning in the nineteenth century established, then repeatedly reused, signifiers of time and place that created an easily recognizable imagistic space, one with stylized elements of setting, archetypical characters and expected broad story arcs. This exoticization of the West, the view of within from without, relies on markers or tropes of cultural difference from the normative culture that become readily identifiable characteristics of the artistic imagistic frontier. Mythicization of the West followed in symbolizing the exoticized frontier as representing various aspects of national identity (especially American identity), including rugged individualism and exceptionalism. This thesis examines four operas – Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (1910), Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), John Estacio’s Filumena (2003), and Allan Bell’s Turtle Wakes (2001) – for how each individually engages exoticism of the frontier with imagistic, mythological and musical codifications of the West in a manner that both extends late nineteenth-century romanticism and exoticism operatic practices and incorporates modernist musical elements.
dc.identifier.citation	Daly, D. S. (2023). Exoticism in operatic depiction of the frontier West (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/117747
dc.identifier.uri	https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/42590
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	Musicology
dc.subject	Opera
dc.subject	Exoticism
dc.subject	Historiography
dc.subject	Frontier studies
dc.subject.classification	Music
dc.subject.classification	Theater
dc.subject.classification	Art History
dc.title	Exoticism in Operatic Depiction of the Frontier West
dc.type	master thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Music
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Master of Arts (MA)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.