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Another Stolen Ribbon—Mozart and Kierkegaard

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Abstract

Tuman treats the strange case of Cherubino, the youthful page of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, who was adapted from the Beaumarchais play where he was possibly modeled on the youthful Rousseau of the Confessions. In Mozart’s opera, the character of Cherubino is nominally presented as a great lover of women, but, in truth, he spends much of his time doting on his stepmother, the Countess, when he is not hiding out in women’s dressing rooms and wearing their clothes. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and great Mozart enthusiast, also discusses the effeminate Cherubino even if his real interest is in the hyper-masculine Don Giovanni.

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Tuman, M. (2019). Another Stolen Ribbon—Mozart and Kierkegaard. In: The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15701-2_4

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