ISBN: 0226044548 9780226044545

Category: Music / Genres & Styles / Opera

Page count: 543

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. <i>Opera and Sovereignty</i> 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. <br> 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, <i>Opera and Sovereignty</i> will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.