Opera and the Enlightenment

by Edited by Thomas Bauman , Marita Petzoldt McClymonds

• ISBN13: 9780521034777
• ISBN10: 0521034779
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a collection of essays to explore the wide dimensions and influence of eighteenth-century opera. In a series of articles by leading scholars in the field, a range of perspectives are offered on the important figures of the day, including Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Rameau and Mozart, and on the fundamental problems of creation, revision, borrowing, influence and intertextuality. Other essays reinterpret librettos of serious opera in the French and Italian theatre during the later eighteenth century. Sister arts, notably painting, the novel, ballet and the spoken stage, are also examined in their relationship to the development of opera. Bracketing the collection are studies of the early pastoral opera and of Prokofiev, which expand our historical view of operatic life during the Age of Reason. The book contains numerous rare illustrations, and will be of interest to scholars and students of opera and theatre history.

Table of Contents

List of plates

Library abbreviations

Introduction Thomas Bauman

Prologue

Pastoral and musical magic in the birth of opera

Opera and the Visual Arts

Moralizing at the tomb: Poussin's Arcadian shepherds in eighteenth-century England and Germany

Dr Burney, the bear, and the knight: E. F. Burney's Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music

New light(s) on Weber's Wolf's Glen scene

Serious Opera

Sinfonia and drama in early eighteenth-century opera seria

The dramatic role of the chorus in French opera: evidence for the use of gesture, 1670-1770

Transforming opera seria: Verazi's innovations and their impact on opera in Italy

Handel and Gluck

Handel's Serse

The 'sweet song' in Demofoonte: a Gluck borrowing from Handel

ZTphire et Flore: a 'galant' early ballet

Gluck's Iphigenia operas: sources and strategies

Concerning Mozart

The 'storm' music of Beaumarchais' Barbier de STville

On Don Giovanni, No. 2 Joseph Kerman

Leopold II, Mozart, and the return to a Golden Age

Epilogue

From fairy tale to opera in four moves (not so simple)

Index

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