'Ah! quel plaisir d'être soldat!' Hans Christian Andersen, music, and the soldier

'Ah! quel plaisir d'être soldat!' Hans Christian Andersen, music, and the soldier

20190228T180000

20190228T194500

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Jens Hesselager, University of CopenhagenLike the other chapters in Hans Christian Andersens novel Kun en Spillemand (1837), chapter 9 begins with an epigraph. It reads: “Ah! quel plaisir d’être soldat” – quoting the then popular opéra-comique La dame blanche (1825), words by E. Scribe and music by A. Boieldieu. The chapter concerns the protagonist’s father leaving for war-services, and then, not long thereafter, the arrival of a letter announcing his death.In my presentation, I will take my cue from this epigraph. I want to address, first, the general question of how to interpret ‘musical’ intertextual references such as this one. How may a reading of such references take into account not only the verbal, but also the vocal and musical qualities of the ‘hypotext’?Secondly, I want to ask how the figure of the soldier, as evoked and implicitly ‘musicalized’ here – and also elsewhere – by Andersen, relates to a wider context of musical representations of soldiers – sometimes young, sometimes female – in musical-theatrical repertoires, in which issues of conscription, masculinity, discipline, patriotism, bravery, anxiety, mutilation etc. are being negotiated (or muted, repressed).

https://alumni.unistra.fr/fr/event/-ah-quel-plaisir-d-etre-soldat-hans-christian-andersen-music-and-the-soldier/2019/02/28/1311