Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth

Pestelli Giorgio Whittall Mary Chalmers Kenneth Bianconi Bianconi Lorenzo

ISBN 10: 0226045927 / ISBN 13: 9780226045924

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2003

About this Item

pp. xiv + 456 Illus.

Seller Inventory # 8248476

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226045927
• ISBN 13: 9780226045924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting its focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.

This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlouse offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera.

About the Authors

Lorenzo Bianconi is a professor of musical dramaturgy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the author of Music in the Seventeenth Century.

Giorgio Pestelli is a professor of music history at the University of Turin, Italy, and music critic for La Stampa. He is the author of The Age of Mozart and Beethoven. Together they edited Opera Production and Its Resources and Opera on Stage, both books in The History of Italian Opera series published by the University of Chicago Press.