Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:01am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Comic Subversions and Intertexts in Early Modern Opera Session Chair: Catherine Gordon Discussant: Kate Van Orden | |
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Why is the Wine Gone?: The Heroic Archetype in Marais’ Ariane et Bacchus (1696) Case Western Reserve University, In the late seventeenth century, works premiered at the Paris Opéra demonstrate a significant recalibration of the balance between juxtaposed ideals of gloire and plaisir, reflecting a broader cultural transformation visible in literature, theater, and music. Taking Marin Marais’ 1696 tragedie en musique Ariane et Bacchus as a case study, this paper examines how one opera participates in this reweighting of values by recharacterizing the figure of Bacchus within heroic discourse. Although Bacchus is known today as the god of wine, classical mythology also supplies him with a heroic dimension, evident through the traditions surrounding his Indian conquest. Whereas other seventeenth-century French dramatic works associate the god with wine, madness, excess, and burlesque spectacle, the text of Ariane et Bacchus eschews these typical Bacchic themes. Never once does Ariane et Bacchus even mention wine. Instead, before Bacchus appears onstage, other characters frame him as a conquering hero who fully embodies vaillance and gloire. The livret thus places Bacchus squarely within the traditional rhetoric of heroism embodied by the tragèdie en musique. Yet once Bacchus finally enters, both music and dramatic action complicate this heroic image. In contrast to Lully’s late tragèdies, which treat love as a corrupting threat to heroism, Ariane et Bacchus exalts love and pleasure as values to be prized alongside glory. The opera presents the embrace of love’s pleasures as a worthy pursuit, one that can rival or even supplant a hero’s aspiration to glory. The question remains: Why invoke Bacchus at all, only to strip him of one of his primary attributes? Drawing on late-antique heroic tradition and visual representations from both antiquity and the early-modern era that align Bacchus with conquest and nobility, this paper argues that Ariane et Bacchus selectively activates the deity’s heroic mythology while avoiding associations that would tip the character into the realm of burlesque excess. By removing Bacchus’s characteristic association with wine and foregrounding the mythology of his Indian conquest, he becomes an ideal god to represent a new ideal for kingship: a galant hero who blends the values of gloire and plaisir. | |