Situating opera : period, genre, reception / Herbert Lindenberger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lindenberger, Herbert, 1929-2018, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in opera.

Cambridge studies in opera

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Opera.

Opera--Social aspects.

Operas--Literary themes, motives.

Operas.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 313 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.

Contents:

Prologue: why opera? Why (how, where) situate?

Anatomy of a war horse: Il trovatore from A to Z

On opera and society (assuming a relationship)

Opera and the novel: antithetical or complementary?

Opera by other means

Opera and/as lyric

From separatism to union: aesthetic theorizing from Reynolds to Wagner

Toward a characterization of modernist opera

Anti-theatricality in twentieth-century opera

A brief consumers' history of opera

Epilogue: why (what, how if) opera studies?

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-21540-4

0-511-85130-8

1-282-81821-X

9786612818219

0-511-91762-7

0-511-91664-7

0-511-91483-0

0-511-91860-7

0-511-91303-6

OCLC:

670411502