Description: New plays and operas have often tried to upset the status quo or disturb the assumptions of theatre audiences. Yet, as this study explores, the reactions of the audience or of the authorities are often more extreme than the creators had envisaged, to include outrage, riots, protests or censorship. Scandal on Stage looks at ten famous theater scandals of the past two centuries in Germany and France as symptoms of contemporary social, political, ethical, and aesthetic upheavals. The writers and composers concerned, including Schiller, Stravinsky, Strauss, Brecht and Weil, portrayed new artistic and ideological ideas that came into conflict with the expectations of their audiences. In a comparative perspective, Theodore Ziolkowski shows how theatrical scandals reflect or challenge cultural and ethical assumptions and asks whether theatre can still be, as Schiller wrote, a moral institution: one that successfully makes its audience think differently about social, political and ethical questions.
Review Quotes: "His cherry-picking of legendary scandals (including operas) allows him to support his and Schiller's thesis without too many unhelpful digressions from the notion that the stage exists as a moral institution in which art is provocation and in which scandal, as defined here, is a clash between artist and audience over aesthetics and/or ethics. Beginning with Schiller's Die Räuber and Victor Hugo's Hernani and including works by Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Schnitzler, Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky, Rolf Hochhuth, and others, Ziolkowski establishes the sticking points of each scandal and illuminates the sociopolitical and/or aesthetic changes emerging from each...Highly recommended"
-J. Fisher, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Choice Reviews Online