Claudio Monteverdi's Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation

Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics can shed new light on Monteverdi’s two Venetian operas (and their respective librettos, by Badoaro and Busenello), not only at the levels of textual criticism, historical exegesis, and dramaturgy, but also with regard to concrete choices of performance, staging, and mise-en-scène. Following an Introduction setting up the interdisciplinary agenda, the volume comprises two main parts: ‘Contexts and Sources’ deals with the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts of the works - librettos and scores; 'Performance and Interpretation’ offers critical and historical insights regarding the casting, singing, reciting, staging, and conducting of the two operas. This volume will appeal to scholars and researchers in Opera Studies and Music History as well as be of interest to early music performers and all those involved with presenting opera on stage.

Ellen Rosand, George A. Saden Professor of Music Emerita at Yale (1992-2014), is the author of Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (1991), and Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (2007). She also edited Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage (2013), is General Editor of Cavalli Opere, a critical edition of the operas of Francesco Cavalli, and founded the Yale Baroque Opera Project, an undergraduate opera company, in 2006, with the support of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Stefano La Via is Professor of "Storia della Poesia per musica" and "Storia della Canzone d’autore" at the University of Pavia, Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage (Cremona). Educated at the Universities of Rome and Princeton, he has published essays on the relationship between poetry and music in various historical periods, with particular reference to 16th-century Madrigal, 17th-/18th-century Opera, Auteur Song in Europe and the Americas.