Category: CAD Development Part 2 Week 3

While reading these articles and paper I am thinking about the bridge between high and low culture (a bridge I have explored in animation). I am interested in how the ‘operatic’ is treated in popular culture in an alien-like concept and yet Opera engages with the most ‘human’ of themes, such as the emotion of death, love, revenge and so on.

While reading these articles and paper I am thinking about the bridge between high and low culture (a bridge I have explored in animation). I am interested in how the ‘operatic’ is treated in popular culture in an alien-like concept and yet Opera engages with the most ‘human’ of themes, such as the emotion of death, love, revenge and so on.

Danse Macabre
In Alone in the dark videogame, the player must play the gramophone to move the ballroom dancers away from the pirates chest. The gramophone plays Danse Macabre. This track is popularised by the Jonathan Creek murder mystery TV series and would be an nice step into classical music from the outset of the game.

In the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart’s Death scene is an incredibly powerful piece (sends Goose pimples up the spine) and this track could be played on the death characters violin in the red room.

Visuals from this opera scene will inform the character design (but not entirely). Deaths instrument of choice here is a burning sword!

Danse Macabre
In Alone in the dark videogame, the player must play the gramophone to move the ballroom dancers away from the pirates chest. The gramophone plays Danse Macabre. This track is popularised by the Jonathan Creek murder mystery TV series and would be an nice step into classical music from the outset of the game.

In the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart’s Death scene is an incredibly powerful piece (sends Goose pimples up the spine) and this track could be played on the death characters violin in the red room.

Visuals from this opera scene will inform the character design (but not entirely). Deaths instrument of choice here is a burning sword!

Given the way in which death is treated as either a reward or punishment in Opera, I am turning my attention to the way in which death is treated in videogames. I know that in animation, the breathing life into the inanimate and the treatment of death in Svankmayer and the brother quays film give a sense of the Macabre, and of course the discourse in the uncanny valley and the many texts that relate to cgi and the depiction of humans are all well worn paths. I haven’t looked at videogames through the lens of death before.. although the treatment of the ‘Gothic’ and its counterpart the ‘sublime’ are themes I have noted before now.

I am really interested in the following three things:

1) How is dying treated in videogames? As a reward or punishment?

2) How is ‘Death’ depicted in character and prop design in videogames. What are designers references, tropes? Is there an alignment with opera ?

3) How is Operatic orchestration used to create a sense of death and foreboding? What tracks are used? How do these relate to the game design?

The answers to these questions should inform my ‘Death’ character design which I will start to sketch tomorrow.

This article written in the guardian raises some really interesting points:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/26/games.guardianweeklytechnologysection

And also, this article which mainly talks about the death mechanic in games.

I like to see devs mess around with death and try new things. I mean, ‘death’ in games context is completely contrary to death irl, where you have one shot, that’s it, and we don’t know what, if anything comes next. 

https://www.destructoid.com/what-does-the-community-think-of-death-in-video-games–455792.phtml

Although I am interested in the mechanic of dying in videogames, I am interested in depictions of  death as a character and also games in which death, and the dead, are central to the narrative.

Examples:

Depictions of Death 

Deaths props (killing weapons of choice) 

Scythe 🙂

Alternatively games in which death and the dead are central themes (deaths work)

Given the way in which death is treated as either a reward or punishment in Opera, I am turning my attention to the way in which death is treated in videogames. I know that in animation, the breathing life into the inanimate and the treatment of death in Svankmayer and the brother quays film give a sense of the Macabre, and of course the discourse in the uncanny valley and the many texts that relate to cgi and the depiction of humans are all well worn paths. I haven’t looked at videogames through the lens of death before.. although the treatment of the ‘Gothic’ and its counterpart the ‘sublime’ are themes I have noted before now.

I am really interested in the following three things:

1) How is dying treated in videogames? As a reward or punishment?

2) How is ‘Death’ depicted in character and prop design in videogames. What are designers references, tropes? Is there an alignment with opera ?

3) How is Operatic orchestration used to create a sense of death and foreboding? What tracks are used? How do these relate to the game design?

The answers to these questions should inform my ‘Death’ character design which I will start to sketch tomorrow.

This article written in the guardian raises some really interesting points:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/26/games.guardianweeklytechnologysection

And also, this article which mainly talks about the death mechanic in games.

I like to see devs mess around with death and try new things. I mean, ‘death’ in games context is completely contrary to death irl, where you have one shot, that’s it, and we don’t know what, if anything comes next. 

https://www.destructoid.com/what-does-the-community-think-of-death-in-video-games–455792.phtml

Although I am interested in the mechanic of dying in videogames, I am interested in depictions of  death as a character and also games in which death, and the dead, are central to the narrative.

Examples:

Depictions of Death 

Deaths props (killing weapons of choice) 

Scythe 🙂

Alternatively games in which death and the dead are central themes (deaths work)

http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html
13.02.20

As the earliest operas were modeled after a certain conception of Greek drama, the tragic ones among them naturally reflected an idea of death in line with their model. The first operas took plots from mythology, including Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the oldest opera still produced with any regularity. The story is the familiar one that begins when the happy marriage of Orpheus to Euridice is terminated by Euridice’s death. The gods then give Orpheus permission to travel into the underworld to retrieve his wife, such is his love for her. Their single prohibition: “Do not look at her until you reach the sunlight.” Of course, he cannot resist a glance backward and the entire enterprise is ruined. The story links love and death; in a very broad sense, the ensuing history of tragic opera has been an elaboration on that theme.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6DqzkczbL

‘many characters in early operas die simply for lack of love, frequently accompanied by the most wretched self-pity” 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr1R5G8L

In his triptych of operas made in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte— The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte — life takes center stage and is flooded with light. Forgiveness among quarreling and conspiring lovers is the theme of both The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte. Death figures only in Don Giovanni,when the famous lover (Don Juan of legend) kills the father of one of his conquests in a duel, and is later himself dragged to hell by the dead father’s shadow. Even so, Giovanni’s killing of the Commendatore is an act of self-defense, not premeditated murder, and when Giovanni is pulled to hell, the punishment seems inappropriate. In some versions of the opera an ensemble of Giovanni’s friends and enemies sing about life after his death and the distinct feeling is one of loss. An aspect of life has been condemned by moral agent (the Commendatore) and snuffed out.” 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr45454m


Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr3TVO66

The advent of Richard Wagner’s music dramas ushered in an entirely reformed view of death. While the death of the individual was the cornerstone of tragedy for the Italians, it took on a transcendent meaning for Wagner. In a Wagner music drama (a term he preferred to the Italian “opera”), individual death is nearly always a meaningful sacrifice to a greater whole. Death is no longer punishment, it is a kind of reward in the form of escape from desire. In Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the title characters find true love only in death; in fact, the musical climax is a passage called the “Liebestod,” or “Love-Death.” Their ends as individuals return them to a transcendent unity. Desire and death are one.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr4vouyI

Late in life Nietzsche contradicted himself. In an essay titled The Case of Wagner (1888), he condemned Wagner’s embrace of death and praised Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) for its sunniness and embrace of life. Carmen, of course, ends with the death of its heroine, and she even sees it coming. She has rejected her former lover for a new one and the former will stab her to death outside the bullring. She has seen this in the cards— literally. But her death is not a sacrifice, it is an affirmation of the values by which she has chosen to live. Nietzsche at the last saw in this a greater, larger thing than Wagner’s “love-death.”

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr5bfUPX

Cavalleria was shocking in its time, as much for its directness of expression as for what it expressed. Here were revenge and murder stripped bare of any noble pretence or mythological garment. The story is a simple one involving a Sicilian soldier, his burning lust for a married woman, and the inevitable outcome.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr6SIYiP

Death figures oddly in the sole comedy of Trittico, the enduringly charming Gianni Schicchi. In this opera after Dante, the title character feigns to be the voice of a dying man (who is, in fact, already dead) in order to will himself the man’s fortune. This is not selfishness, but a distorted nobility, the opera implies, as Schicchi does this in order to produce a proper dowry for his love-stricken daughter. In Turandot, left incomplete at Puccini’s death in 1924, the gentle Liu sacrifices herself for her master Calaf so that he can claim as his own the moon goddess Turandot. This role of woman as sacrificial object was uniquely nineteenth century and predominantly Mediterranean.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr7FZa2F

In Jenufa, the title character is repeatedly wronged by those around her. Her fiancé’s jealous brother disfigures her, her fiancé leaves her, and her stepmother drowns her illegitimate baby. Through it all, Jenufa finds opportunity to grow emotionally. In The Cunning Little Vixen, the story is set among animals. The title creature escapes a gamekeeper to found a family, only to see her path lead to death. Yet, it is a death absorbed into a cycle of life. Nature has taught humankind a lesson. The Makrapulos Affair concerns an opera singer as old as her art. In the course of the opera, 337-year-old Emilia Marty (one of many names she has had over the centuries) must learn how to die.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr8gQjDL

In the French composer Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1958), death is the very subject. A young woman fears death and, seeing the tumult of life around her and the threat of the 1789 French Revolution, escapes to a convent. At length, it becomes clear that the other nuns have taken vows in order to embrace death, not avoid it. The final scene, one of the most chilling in the repertoire, calls for the sisters to chant a Salve Regina (Hail Queen of Heaven) as they exit the stage, one by one, to be guillotined. Periodically, the guillotine falls. The chilling effect is a constant diminuendo, until at last only one voice is heard singing, and that, too, is terminated.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr9Bna2G

Tragic drama without music can convey horror, pity, fear, and sorrow, but music adds a dimension of unsettling personal involvement. 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr9Z3aSk

Now, to examine well known death scenes in opera…

• Mozart – Don Giovanni.
• Massenet – Werther.
• Catalani – La Wally.
• Adams – The Death of Klinghoffer.
• Leoncavallo – Pagliacci (Nedda)
• Shostakovich – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
• Puccini – La Bohème.
• Strauss – Elektra.

http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html
13.02.20

As the earliest operas were modeled after a certain conception of Greek drama, the tragic ones among them naturally reflected an idea of death in line with their model. The first operas took plots from mythology, including Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the oldest opera still produced with any regularity. The story is the familiar one that begins when the happy marriage of Orpheus to Euridice is terminated by Euridice’s death. The gods then give Orpheus permission to travel into the underworld to retrieve his wife, such is his love for her. Their single prohibition: “Do not look at her until you reach the sunlight.” Of course, he cannot resist a glance backward and the entire enterprise is ruined. The story links love and death; in a very broad sense, the ensuing history of tragic opera has been an elaboration on that theme.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6DqzkczbL

‘many characters in early operas die simply for lack of love, frequently accompanied by the most wretched self-pity” 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr1R5G8L

In his triptych of operas made in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte— The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte — life takes center stage and is flooded with light. Forgiveness among quarreling and conspiring lovers is the theme of both The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte. Death figures only in Don Giovanni,when the famous lover (Don Juan of legend) kills the father of one of his conquests in a duel, and is later himself dragged to hell by the dead father’s shadow. Even so, Giovanni’s killing of the Commendatore is an act of self-defense, not premeditated murder, and when Giovanni is pulled to hell, the punishment seems inappropriate. In some versions of the opera an ensemble of Giovanni’s friends and enemies sing about life after his death and the distinct feeling is one of loss. An aspect of life has been condemned by moral agent (the Commendatore) and snuffed out.” 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr45454m


Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr3TVO66

The advent of Richard Wagner’s music dramas ushered in an entirely reformed view of death. While the death of the individual was the cornerstone of tragedy for the Italians, it took on a transcendent meaning for Wagner. In a Wagner music drama (a term he preferred to the Italian “opera”), individual death is nearly always a meaningful sacrifice to a greater whole. Death is no longer punishment, it is a kind of reward in the form of escape from desire. In Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the title characters find true love only in death; in fact, the musical climax is a passage called the “Liebestod,” or “Love-Death.” Their ends as individuals return them to a transcendent unity. Desire and death are one.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr4vouyI

Late in life Nietzsche contradicted himself. In an essay titled The Case of Wagner (1888), he condemned Wagner’s embrace of death and praised Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) for its sunniness and embrace of life. Carmen, of course, ends with the death of its heroine, and she even sees it coming. She has rejected her former lover for a new one and the former will stab her to death outside the bullring. She has seen this in the cards— literally. But her death is not a sacrifice, it is an affirmation of the values by which she has chosen to live. Nietzsche at the last saw in this a greater, larger thing than Wagner’s “love-death.”

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr5bfUPX

Cavalleria was shocking in its time, as much for its directness of expression as for what it expressed. Here were revenge and murder stripped bare of any noble pretence or mythological garment. The story is a simple one involving a Sicilian soldier, his burning lust for a married woman, and the inevitable outcome.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr6SIYiP

Death figures oddly in the sole comedy of Trittico, the enduringly charming Gianni Schicchi. In this opera after Dante, the title character feigns to be the voice of a dying man (who is, in fact, already dead) in order to will himself the man’s fortune. This is not selfishness, but a distorted nobility, the opera implies, as Schicchi does this in order to produce a proper dowry for his love-stricken daughter. In Turandot, left incomplete at Puccini’s death in 1924, the gentle Liu sacrifices herself for her master Calaf so that he can claim as his own the moon goddess Turandot. This role of woman as sacrificial object was uniquely nineteenth century and predominantly Mediterranean.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr7FZa2F

In Jenufa, the title character is repeatedly wronged by those around her. Her fiancé’s jealous brother disfigures her, her fiancé leaves her, and her stepmother drowns her illegitimate baby. Through it all, Jenufa finds opportunity to grow emotionally. In The Cunning Little Vixen, the story is set among animals. The title creature escapes a gamekeeper to found a family, only to see her path lead to death. Yet, it is a death absorbed into a cycle of life. Nature has taught humankind a lesson. The Makrapulos Affair concerns an opera singer as old as her art. In the course of the opera, 337-year-old Emilia Marty (one of many names she has had over the centuries) must learn how to die.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr8gQjDL

In the French composer Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1958), death is the very subject. A young woman fears death and, seeing the tumult of life around her and the threat of the 1789 French Revolution, escapes to a convent. At length, it becomes clear that the other nuns have taken vows in order to embrace death, not avoid it. The final scene, one of the most chilling in the repertoire, calls for the sisters to chant a Salve Regina (Hail Queen of Heaven) as they exit the stage, one by one, to be guillotined. Periodically, the guillotine falls. The chilling effect is a constant diminuendo, until at last only one voice is heard singing, and that, too, is terminated.

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr9Bna2G

Tragic drama without music can convey horror, pity, fear, and sorrow, but music adds a dimension of unsettling personal involvement. 

Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Operatic-Death.html#ixzz6Dr9Z3aSk

Now, to examine well known death scenes in opera…

• Mozart – Don Giovanni.
• Massenet – Werther.
• Catalani – La Wally.
• Adams – The Death of Klinghoffer.
• Leoncavallo – Pagliacci (Nedda)
• Shostakovich – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
• Puccini – La Bohème.
• Strauss – Elektra.