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The Baroque Libretto catalogues the Baroque Italian operas and oratorios in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto and offers an analysis of how the study of libretto can inform the understanding of opera.
Nowhere in Europe the Italian opera libretto has had such a direct and decisive influence on original national drama production as it did in Dubrovnik during the 17th and 18th century. In the "Golden Age of Croatian Literature", a hybrid drama genre was created. For more than a century, authors of this genre looked attentively at the most important trends of Italian opera production and followed them faithfully. In Croatian literature of that period, a specific model of libretti without music was created, one that appropriated the Italian libretto. These plays were not performed along with functional music, although sometimes authors and actors would provide instrumental accompaniment to the texts. Nothing more needs to be said about the dissemination and specific reception of Italian opera libretti in Dubrovnik during the 17th and 18th century to be understood as occupying a noteworthy place in the cultural life of Europe.
Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stages of Venice during the seventeenth century. All of the components necessary to opera production are highlighted, from the financial backing, to the libretto and the score, to the singers, dancers, the scenery, and the costumes.
The Politics of Princely Entertainment follows the travels of Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and Maria Mancini, two of the most active music patrons of seventeenth-century Italy, tracing their influence on music across a rapidly transforming Europe through the singers, composers, and librettists they supported.
Convivial beginnings. The symposium and the birth of opera ; The Renaissance banquet as multimedia art ; Orpheus at the cardinal's table ; Eating at the opera house -- "Tastes funny" : tragic and comic meals from Monteverdi to Mozart ; Comedy as embodiment in Monteverdi and Mozart ; The insatiable : tyrants and libertines ; Indulging in comic opera : gastronomy as identity -- The effects of feasting and fasting ; Coffee and chocolate from Bach to Puccini ; Verdi and the laws of gastromusicology ; The Callas diet.
Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, this book shows how war and colonial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Anastasia Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a novel approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. Her extensive research brings the history of communication in dialogue with conquest and empire-building in the Mediterranean to provide an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. The book argues that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. It sheds new light on the militarisation of the Venetian public sphere and exposes the connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.
The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend i...
In this book, author Louise K. Stein analyzes early modern opera as appreciated and produced by Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán (1629-87), Marqués de Heliche and del Carpio and a distinguished patron of the arts in Madrid, Rome, and Naples. It also reveals his lasting legacy in the Americas during a crucial period for the growth and development of opera and the history of singing.
This collection of essays analyzes global depictions of the devil from theological, Biblical, and literary perspectives, spanning the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. The chapters explore demonic representations in the literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Cormac McCarthy, among others. The text examines other media such as the operas Orfeo and Erminia sul Giordano and the television shows Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. The Hermeneutics of Hell, featuring an international set of established and up-and-coming authors, masterfully examines the evolution of the devil from the Biblical accounts of the Middle Ages to the individualized presence of the modern world.