Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Voices
- Part II Ears
- Part III Technologies
- 8 Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
- 9 Technological Phantoms of the Opéra
- 10 Circuit Listening
- Part IV Bodies
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Circuit Listening
from Part III - Technologies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2019
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Voices
- Part II Ears
- Part III Technologies
- 8 Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
- 9 Technological Phantoms of the Opéra
- 10 Circuit Listening
- Part IV Bodies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Giacomo Puccini was enthusiastic about electricity. To begin with, there were the modern luxuries it made available: electric lighting, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the refrigerator – he made use of them all. When he sailed westward across the Atlantic in 1907, on board the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, he made a point of counting the electric light bulbs in his cabin – ‘I have seventy’ – and noting all the other extravagances powered by electricity. There were electric devices on board that he intended to enjoy (heated water, cigar lighters, a Marconi telegraph to supply passengers with news from around the world); and ones he didn’t, like the mechanical wooden exercise horses, ‘onto which American women climb each day to jostle the uterus’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination , pp. 227 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019