The Indian Parsifal: Revisiting Felix Gotthelf’s Forgotten Opera Mahadeva
In this chapter, Markus Schlaffke describes a listening experiment designed to re-access the music of Felix Gotthelf’s Indian opera Mahadeva and to analyse the sounds of what had clearly been a significant cultural phenomenon. He approaches the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) as a listening space in which differing experiences of the modern world were brought into harmony at the turn of the twentieth century and clarifies how, in 1910, the success and failure of an Indian opera depended not only on whether it produced an aesthetic innovation but also on whether it succeeded to bring the sphere of the religious, the experience of alterity, and colonial knowledge into play.
Isabella Schwaderer & Gerdien Jonker (Hrsg.)
Religious Entanglements Between Germans and Indians, 1800–1945
(Reihe: Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies)
Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2023
print: ISBN 978-3-031-40374-3 // E-Book: 978-3-031-40375-0 (open access)
325 Seiten
128,39 € (Hardcover)