Opera and the Enlightenment

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 4/20/1995
EAN 9780521461726, ISBN10: 0521461723

Hardcover, 332 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

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.

List of plates
Library abbreviations
Introduction Thomas Bauman
Part I. Prologue
1. Pastoral and musical magic in the birth of opera Gary Tomlinson
Part II. Opera and the Visual Arts
2. Moralizing at the tomb
Poussin's Arcadian shepherds in eighteenth-century England and Germany Thomas Bauman
3. Dr Burney, the bear, and the knight
E. F. Burney’s Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music Kerry S. Grant
4. New light(s) on Weber’s Wolf’s Glen scene Anthony Newcomb
Part III. Serious Opera
5. Sinfonia and drama in early eighteenth-century opera seria Reinhard Strohm
6. The dramatic role of the chorus in French opera
evidence for the use of gesture, 1670–1770 Mary Cyr
7. Transforming opera seria
Verazi’s innovations and their impact on opera in Italy Marita Petzoldt McClymonds
Part IV. Handel and Gluck
8. Handel’s Serse Winton Dean
9. The ‘sweet song’ in Demofoonte
a Gluck borrowing from Handel John H. Roberts
10. Zéphire et Flore
a ‘galant’ early ballet by Angiolini and Gluck Bruce Alan Brown
11. Gluck’s Iphigenia operas
sources and strategies Julie E. Cumming
Part V. Concerning Mozart
12. The ‘storm’ music of Beaumarchais’ Barbier de Séville Walter E. Rex
13. On Don Giovanni, No. 2 Joseph Kerman
14. Leopold II, Mozart, and the return to a Golden Age John A. Rice
Part VI. Epilogue
15. From fairy tale to opera in four moves (not so simple) Richard Taruskin
Index.