November 24, 2025
6 pm CET
Jennifer Tipton: A Document in Death and Madness: Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings of Ophelia’s Death
This lecture examines the nineteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Ophelia as a cultural symbol of femininity, madness, and tragic beauty, using art song settings as interdisciplinary documents that both mirror and shape prevailing ideals. Drawing from literature, visual art, theater, and vocal music, the presentation explores how composers such as Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Robert Schumann reimagined Ophelia’s death in the mediums of mélodie and Lied. The analysis investigates musical symbolism, particularly the “water motive” as a representation of both nature and Ophelia’s psychological dissolution. Berlioz’s quotation of the idée fixe from Symphonie Fantastique functions as a cipher for doomed femininity, while Saint-Saëns uses post-Romantic lyricism to heighten Ophelia’s ethereal qualities. Schumann delays harmonic resolution until the final measure, allowing her death to be experienced as a sonic event rather than a narrated outcome. Interwoven with musical analysis are references to nineteenth-century theatrical interpretations, Romantic poetry, and iconic visual depictions that collectively aestheticize female madness and death. The presentation also engages feminist and cultural theory to interrogate how these works transform Ophelia from a dramatic character into a cultural archetype, an enduring figure through which questions of gender, vulnerability, and mortality are expressed. Ultimately, the lecture demonstrates that Ophelia’s death, as rendered in these art songs, is more than a tragic literary moment; it is a recurring cultural narrative that transcends disciplinary boundaries. By examining the intersections of music, literature, and visual culture, this study reveals how the Romantic imagination shaped, and was shaped by, its portrayals of Ophelia, leaving a legacy that continues to influence interpretations of her story today.
Jennifer Tipton, DMA, is a voice pedagogue, researcher, and director based in Miami. She maintains a thriving private studio where she trains singers in classical, musical theater, and CCM styles. Her teaching emphasizes stylistic versatility, adaptability, and vocal health across genres, preparing students for diverse careers as performers and educators. Her students have excelled in national competitions and earned scholarships to leading institutions. Dr. Tipton’s current research, Vowel Preferences in the Passaggio: A Tool for Vocal Classification and Stylistic Alignment, was recently presented at the IAFOR Arts and Humanities Conference in Paris. She also directs opera and music theater productions, fostering creativity and collaboration.
Kimberly Soby: Framing Ophelia: Gender, Madness, and Musical Agency in Strauss’s Ophelia Lieder
Composed in 1918, Richard Strauss’s Ophelia Lieder (Op. 67) transform Shakespeare’s fragmented heroine into a tightly framed musical study in madness and fragility. Sung from Ophelia’s perspective, these songs distill her fragmented speech from Act IV into compact, haunting vignettes. This paper examines how Strauss’s musical language both amplifies and reframes Ophelia’s madness within early twentieth-century conceptions of femininity, mental illness, and fragility. Strauss’s compositional choices, including modal inflections, abrupt metric shifts, registral extremes, and sparse piano textures, participate in a long-standing aesthetic coding of the “madwoman” in art song. The songs’ fragmented melodic arcs and frequent tonal destabilizations mirror the textual disjunctions, yet also place Ophelia’s voice firmly within the aestheticized, controlled space of the male-composed Lied. This juxtaposition invites consideration of whether these settings reinforce a cultural trope of the female voice as beautiful in its brokenness, or whether moments of musical agency emerge that complicate such a reading. By situating the Ophelia Lieder within broader discourses of gendered representation in art song, this paper explores the ways in which musical style can both reflect and shape cultural narratives about women’s voices and mental states. Comparison with earlier and contemporary settings of Ophelia’s texts highlights differing strategies for musicalizing madness, while contextual analysis of the songs’ harmonic and formal devices reveals the tensions between expressive possibility and the constraints imposed by compositional framing. Ultimately, this paper argues that Strauss’s Ophelia provides a compelling case study for exploring how early twentieth-century song both preserves and challenges prevailing gendered archetypes.
Kimberly Soby, PhD, is a soprano, pianist, and music theorist whose research engages feminist theory, interdisciplinary methods, performance studies, and questions of gendered perception, musical meaning, and aesthetic expectation. Dr. Soby has presented this work at national and international conferences, contributing to ongoing conversations in feminist musicology and gender studies. A new music specialist, she can be heard on recordings released by Naxos, Albany, and Centaur Records. She recently joined the faculty of Connecticut College and has taught at the University of Connecticut, Nova Southeastern University (FL), and New World School of the Arts (FL).
Chair: Lisa Williamson (Ithaca College)
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AGiD Session 3: The Musical Afterlife of Ophelia. Art Song, Madness, and the Female Voice
an online lecture