Osmin's Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text

In his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical―as opposed to a dramatic―necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's Idomeneo is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners are attuned to its seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears.

Peter Kivy is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the author of Music Alone; Authenticities; and Sound and Semblance, all from Cornell.