Opera And Society In Italy And France From Monteverdi To Bourdieu

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

A study of opera in Italy and France from the 1600s to the present day.

This book contemplates the relationship between opera and anthropology. It rests on the following central arguments: on the one hand, opera is quite a new and “exotic” topic for anthropologists, while, on the other, anthropology is still perceived as an unusual approach to opera. Both initial arguments are indicative of the current situation of the relationship between anthropological discipline and opera research. The book introduces the work of anthropologists and ethnographers whose personal and professional affinity for opera has been explicated in their academic and biographical accounts. Anthropological, ethnological, ethnographic, and semiotic accounts of opera by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, William O. Beeman, Denis Laborde, Paul Atkinson, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar establish that opera can be a pertinent object of anthropological interest, ethnographic investigation, cultural analysis, and historical reflection. By touching on opera not merely as a musical, aesthetic, or artistic category, but as a social, cultural, historical, and transnational phenomenon that, over the last four centuries, has significantly influenced and reflected the identity of Western culture and society, this monograph suggests that opera and anthropology no longer need be alien to one another.

Opera is able to offer enchanting performance sites, in which people create and experience glamorous or ecstatic imagined worlds, but behind this picture we find a real social organization embraced by reality, which makes opera's world and its history accessible for ethnographic enquiry, historical reflection and cultural analysis. This book therefore presents the author's original anthropological study, which shows complex historical, socio-cultural, political, economic, ideological, academic and ethnographic facets of opera culture in Slovenia, including the field sites of both Slovenian national opera houses, in Ljubljana and Maribor. The study explicates how social representations of opera are produced and enacted by different social agents involved within the Slovenian national operatic habitus, and how opera is used as an idealized vision of nationhood and national identity in a provincial society.

Claudio Monteverdi: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that navigates the vast scholarly resources on the composer with the most updated compilation since 1989. Claudio Monteverdi transformed and mastered the principal genres of his day and his works influenced generations of musicians and other artists. He initiated one of the most important aesthetic debates of the era by proposing a new relationship between poetry and harmony. In addition to scholarship by musicologists and music theorists, Monteverdi’s music has attracted attention from literary scholars, cultural historians, and critical theorists. Research into Monteverdi and Renaissance and early baroque studies has expanded greatly, with the field becoming more complex as scholars address such issues as gender theory, feminist criticism, cultural theory, new criticism, new historicism, and artistic and popular cultures. The guide serves both as a foundational starting point and as a gateway for future inquiry in such fields as court culture, opera, patronage, and Italian poetry.

This book considers the story of Nero and Octavia, as told in the pseudo-Senecan Octavia and the works of ancient historiographers, and its reception in (early) modern opera and some related examples of other performative genres. In total the study assembles more than 30 performative texts (including 22 librettos), ranging chronologically from L'incoronazione di Poppea in 1642/43 until the early 20th century, and provides detailed information on all of them. In a close examination of the libretto (and dramatic) texts, the study shows the impact and development of this fascinating story from the beginnings of historical opera onwards. The volume demonstrates the various transformations of the characters of Nero and his wives and of the depiction of their relationship over the centuries, and it looks at the tension between “historical” elements and genre conventions. The book is therefore of relevance to literary scholars as well as to readers interested in the evolution of Nero’s image in present-day media.

On July 14, 1789, a crowd of angry French citizens en route to the Bastille broke into the Paris Opera and helped themselves to any sturdy weapon they could find. Yet despite its long association with the royal court, its special privileges, and the splendor of its performances, the Opera itself was spared, even protected, by Revolutionary officials. Victoria Johnson’s Backstage at the Revolution tells the story of how this legendary opera house, despite being a lightning rod for charges of tyranny and waste, weathered the most dramatic political upheaval in European history. Sifting through royal edicts, private letters, and Revolutionary records of all kinds, Johnson uncovers the roots of the Opera’s survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established by the conditions of its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Johnson’s rich cultural history moves between both epochs, taking readers backstage to see how a motley crew of singers, dancers, royal ministers, poet entrepreneurs, shady managers, and the king of France all played a part in the creation and preservation of one of the world’s most fabled cultural institutions.

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.