Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy

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University of Chicago Press, Oct 5, 2010 - Music - 584 pages
Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period’s social and political upheavals.

Taking an anthropological approach to European music that’s as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera’s shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere. In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today. Ambitiously interdisciplinary, Opera and Sovereignty will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.

From inside the book

Contents

1 Evenings at the opera
1
form feeling exchange
42
first case study
97
4 Festivity and Time
141
second case study
188
6 Myths of sovereignty
226
third case study
284
8 Morals and malcontents
348
fourth case study
389
Epilogue
437
References
443
Index
493
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About the author (2010)

Martha Feldman is professor of music at the University of Chicago.

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