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

Edited by Mauro Fosco Bertola

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

Publisher: Böhlau Verlag Wien

Subjects: Music & Performing Arts

Language: English

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(August 2027)

ISBN: 9783205224723

Price: $57.00

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.

Mauro Fosco Bertola is a Privatdozent in Musicology at the University of Tübingen. He studied philosophy in Italy, specialising in Nicolas Malebranche, and received his PhD in Musicology from Heidelberg University with a thesis on the construction of collective identities in music research and broadcasting in Italy and Germany (1890–1945). His research focuses on contemporary music theatre, the interplay between music and philosophy, and music in film. He completed his habilitation in 2025 on dream representations in works by Kaija Saariaho and Salvatore Sciarrino. He is currently a Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg CURE at Saarland University.

  • Edited by Mauro Fosco Bertola