Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution


Book Description

Polzonetti reveals how revolutionary America inspired eighteenth-century European audiences, and how it can still inspire and entertain us.




Opera, Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples


Book Description

The operatic culture of late eighteenth-century Naples represents the fullest expression of a matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs linking aristocratic, public and religious spheres of contemporary society. The considerable resonance of 'Neapolitan' opera in Europe was verified early in the eighteenth century not only through voluminous reports offered by locals and visitors in gazettes, newspapers, correspondence or diaries, but also, and more importantly, through the rich and tangible artistic patrimony produced for local audiences and then exported to the Italian peninsula and abroad. Naples was not simply a city of entertainment, but rather a cultural epicenter and paradigm producing highly innovative and successful genres of stage drama reflecting every facet of contemporary society. Anthony R. DelDonna provides a rich study of operatic culture from 1775-1800. The book demonstrates how contemporary stage traditions, stimulated by the Enlightenment, engaged with and responded to the changing social, political, and artistic contexts of the late eighteenth century in Naples. It focuses on select yet representative compositions from different genres of opera that illuminate the diverse contemporary cultural forces shaping these works and underlining the continued innovation and European recognition of operatic culture in Naples. It also defines how the cultural milieu of Naples - aristocratic and sacred, private and public - exercises a profound yet idiosyncratic influence on the repertory studied, the creation of which could not have occurred elsewhere on the Continent.




Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. I


Book Description

The first volume of the book series Ottoman Empire and European Theatre focuses on the period between 1756 and 1808, the era of W. A. Mozart (1756-1791) and Sultan Selim III (1761-1808). These historical personalities, whose life-spans overlap, were towering figures of their time: Mozart as an extraordinary composer and Selim III as both a politician and a composer. Inspired by the structure of opera, the forty-four contributions of Volume I are arranged in eight sections, entitled Ouverture, Prologue, Acts I-V and Epilogue. The Ouverture includes the opening speeches of diplomats, politicians, and scholars as well as a memorial text for the "Genius of Opera", Turkish prima donna Leyla Gencer (1928-2008). The Prologue, "The Stage of Politics", features texts by distinguished historians who give an historical overview of the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the late eighteenth century, from both Turkish and Austrian points of view. Act I features texts concerning "Diplomacy and Theatre", and Act II takes the reader to "Europe South, West and North". Act III has contributions concerning theatre in "Central Europe", while Act IV deals with "Mozart" and the world of the seraglio. Act V turns our attention to the Ottoman "Sultan Selim III", and the Epilogue considers literary and theatrical adventures of "The Hero in the Sultan's Harem". Contributions by Metin And, Emre Araci, Tülay Artan, Esin Akalin, Thomas Betzwieser, Annemarie Bönsch, Emil Brix, Christian Brunmayr, Bertrand Michael Buchmann, Aysin Candan, Helga Dostal, Erich Duda, Wolfgang Greisenegger, Heidemaria Gürer, Matthew Head, Caroline Herfert, Bent Holm, Frank Huss, Michael Hüttler, Nadja Kayali, Hans-Peter Kellner, Alexandre Lhâa, Isabelle Moindrot, Ilber Ortayli, Zeynep Oral, Cemal Öztas, William F. Parmentier, Matthias J. Pernerstorfer, Gabriele C. Pfeiffer, Walter Puchner, Günsel Renda, Mustafa Fatih Salgar, Ulrike Schneider, Selin Ipek, Käthe Springer-Dissmann, Suna Suner, Marianne Travén, B. Babür Turna, Derek Weber, Mehmet Alaaddin Yalçinkaya, Selim Yenel.




A Companion to Early Modern Naples


Book Description

Naples was one of the largest cities in early modern Europe, and for about two centuries the largest city in the global empire ruled by the kings of Spain. Its crowded and noisy streets, the height of its buildings, the number and wealth of its churches and palaces, the celebrated natural beauty of its location, the many antiquities scattered in its environs, the fiery volcano looming over it, the drama of its people’s devotions, the size and liveliness - to put it mildly - of its plebs, all made Naples renowned and at times notorious across Europe. The new essays in this volume aim to introduce this important, fascinating, and bewildering city to readers unfamiliar with its history. Contributors are: Tommaso Astarita, John Marino, Giovanni Muto, Vladimiro Valerio, Gaetano Sabatini, Aurelio Musi, Giulio Sodano, Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, Elisa Novi Chavarria, Gabriel Guarino, Giovanni Romeo, Peter Mazur, Angelantonio Spagnoletti, J. Nicholas Napoli, Gaetana Cantone, Anthony DelDonna, Sean Cocco, Melissa Calaresu, Nancy Canepa, David Gentilcore, Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, and Anna Maria Rao. The publisher, editor, and contributors mourn the passing of Gaetana Cantone, who died in April 2013.




Opera and Sovereignty


Book Description

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.




The Lyric Myth of Voice


Book Description

How did "voice" become a metaphor for selfhood in the Western imagination? The Lyric Myth of Voice situates the emergence of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity in late eighteenth-century Italy, where long-standing political anxieties and new notions of cultural enlightenment collided in the mythical figure of the lyric poet-singer. Ultimately, music and literature together shaped the singing voice into a tool for civilizing modern Italian subjects. Drawing on a range of approaches and frameworks from historical musicology to gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, and literary theory, Jessica Gabriel Peritz shows how this ancient yet modern myth of voice attained interpretable form, flesh, and sound. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.




The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera


Book Description

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.




Operatic Geographies


Book Description

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.




The Neapolitan Canzone in the Early Nineteenth Century as Cultivated in the Passatempi musicali of Guillaume Cottrau


Book Description

This volume is a multi-disciplinary study of the Neapolitan tradition of nineteenth-century song or “Canzona napoletana.” It is based on primary (original music manuscripts) and secondary (correspondence, diaries, and varied historical materials) sources recovered from Neapolitan archives, libraries, and private collections. The book takes as its focus the figure of Guillaume Cottrau (1797-1847), a musician and publisher who left a significant breadth of original songs and arrangements issued in the song collection and series entitled Passatempi musicali. Cottrau was a cultural auteur, who integrated his diverse activities as editor, folklorist, and patron of salon music and musicians (including the commissioning of original works and adaptations) to establish a tradition of Neapolitan song. This repertory was disseminated throughout Europe and ultimately the United States to great acclaim through the publication of the Passatempi musicali. The songs presented in the Passatempi musicali remain within the international repertory affiliated with Neapolitan song, including “Fenesta vascia,” “Lo guarracino,” “Cannetella,” and many others. They are, moreover, closely linked to the historical, cultural and linguistic identity of Naples and the Neapolitan diaspora. This volume is the first of its kind in the English language and offers original, unpublished research about the endeavors of Cottrau, the contemporary cultural environs, the artists and their music that established the international fame of the Neapolitan canzona.