Dream and Music Theatre from the 20th to the 21st Century

As the first comprehensive English-language study of its kind, the volume brings together opera and dream studies, exploring the multifaceted role that dreams have played in Western music theatre over the last 150 years and, in turn, opening new lines of inquiry in opera studies. Situated at the crossroads of cultural discourse, subjectivity, and aesthetics, the dream provides a privileged heuristic tool for approaching music theatre’s intermedial nature and its cultural and political embeddedness, yielding new perspectives on its ties to topics as diverse as colonialism, identity, and societal visions. Bridging psychoanalytic and dramaturgical analyses with recent approaches to the dream’s ontological and intermedial significance, the volume offers fresh insights into composers such as Ludomir Różycki, Giacomo Orefice, Jonathan Harvey, Pauline Oliveros, Christian Ofenbauer, Peter Eötvös, or Olga Neuwirth, while also addressing questions of contemporary artistic practices and staging.