work
Les Huguenots
The Huguenots
also: Гугеноты
Giacomo Meyerbeer's 1836 grand opera dramatizing the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, one of the most frequently staged works of the nineteenth-century operatic repertoire.
Reading notes
- Two Scandals §36 The Huguenots
Giacomo Meyerbeer's 1836 grand opera on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, a fixture of the nineteenth-century European and Russian repertoire.
- A Nervous Breakdown §24 Rigoletto-Huguenots-Traviata
The painter's mock-Italian outburst strings together the titles of three of the era's most popular operas -- Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) and La traviata (1853), and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) -- as pure sound, a theatrical flourish meant to impress rather than communicate; his and the medical student's invented gibberish 'Italian' in the lines that follow (loc 24-25) is explicitly performative bravado, a way of turning the visit into a comic set piece rather than reckoning with where they are.