Mimomania : Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac" ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements.

Mary Ann Smart suspects that Nietzsche may have seen and heard more than he realized.

In "Mimomania", she takes his accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music - and that of several of his near-contemporaries - for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted.

As Smart demonstrates, this productive fusion of music and movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Verdi baritone. "Mimomania" tracks such effects through readings of operas by Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner.