| Series |
Cambridge studies in opera
Cambridge studies in opera. ^A396000
|
| Contents |
Goldoni, opera buffa, and Mozart's advent in Vienna / Daniel Heartz -- Lo specchio francese: Viennese opera buffa and the legacy of French theatre / Bruce Alan Brown -- Il re alla caccia and Le Roi et le fermier: Italian and French treatments of class and gender / Marvin Carlson -- Mozart and eighteenth-century comedy / Paolo Gallarati -- Sentimental muse of opera buffa / Edmund J. Goehring -- Biology lessons of opera buffa: gender, nature, and bourgeois society on Mozart's buffa stage / Tia DeNora -- Bourgeois values and opera buffa in 1780s Vienna / Mary Hunter -- Opera seria? Opera buffa? Genre and style as sign / Marita P. McClymonds -- Figaro as misogynist: on aria types and aria rhetoric / Ronald J. Rabin -- Alternative endings of Mozart's Don Giovanni / Michael F. Robinson -- Don Giovanni: recognition denied / Jessica Waldoff -- Analysis and dramaturgy: reflections towards a theory of opera / Sergio Durante -- Understanding opera buffa: analysis=interpretation / James Webster -- Operatic ensembles and the problem of the Don Giovanni sextet / John Platoff -- Buffo roles in Mozart's Vienna: tessitura and tonality as signs of characterization / Julian Rushton. |
| Abstract |
Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. This book offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. The author attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, the author shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cosi fan tutte as a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 426-442) and index. |
| LCCN | 96050282 |
| ISBN | 0521572398 (hardcover) |
