The culture of opera buffa in Mozart's Vienna : a poetics of entertainment / Mary Hunter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hunter, Mary Kathleen, 1951-

Series:

Princeton studies in opera.

Princeton studies in opera

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. Operas.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus.

Opera--Austria--Vienna--18th century.

Opera.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (350 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter 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. Hunter 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, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cos" 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.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Editorial Policies

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: Opera Buffa as Entertainment

CHAPTER ONE. Opera Buffa as Sheer Pleasure

CHAPTER TWO. Opera Buffa's Conservative Frameworks

CHAPTER THREE. Opera Buffa's Social Reversals

PART TWO: The Closed Musical Numbers of Opera Buffa and Their Social Implications

CHAPTER FOUR. Arias: Some Issues

CHAPTER FIVE. Class and Gender in Arias: Five Aria Types

CHAPTER SIX. Ensembles

CHAPTER SEVEN. Beginning and Ending Together: Introduzioni and Finales

PART THREE: Così Fan Tutte le Opere? A Masterwork in Context

CHAPTER EIGHT. Così fan tutte in Conversation

CHAPTER NINE. Così fan tutte and Convention

APPENDIX ONE. Operas Consulted

APPENDIX TWO. Musical Forms in Opera Buffa Arias

APPENDIX THREE. Plot Summaries for I fintieredi, Le gare generose, and L'incognita perseguitata

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-322) and index.

ISBN:

9786612753572

9781282753570

1282753576

9781400822751

1400822750

9781400812158

1400812151

OCLC:

705527053