| Other author/creator | Bianconi, Lorenzo, editor. |
| Other author/creator | Pestelli, Giorgio, editor. |
| Other author/creator | Di Benedetto, Renato, contributor. |
| Other author/creator | Dahlhaus, Carl, 1928-1989 contributor. |
| Other author/creator | Fabbri, Paolo, 1948- contributor. |
| Other author/creator | Pieri, Marzio, contributor. |
| Other author/creator | Leydi, Roberto, 1928-2003, contributor. |
| Other author/creator | Morelli, Giovanni, 1942-2011 contributor. |
| Uniform title | Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi. English. |
| Series |
The history of Italian opera ; v. 6. Part II, Systems
Storia dell'opera italiana. English ; v. 6. ^A983324
|
| Contents |
Poetics and polemics / Renato Di Benedetto. "To imitate speech in song" ; "One of the most honored pleasures in drama" ; "The mind not being able to conceive a heros that sings" ; "A composition that must be disordered if it is to please" ; "Renvoyer cette forme de chant a la musique de concert?" ; "They are not arias, they are magic spells" ; A unified, complete, and musical whole" ; "Precious stones held together with mud" ; "The lightest of transparent veils, obscuring nothing of the drama" ; "The single universal form of musical expression and content" -- The dramaturgy of Italian opera / Carl Dalhaus. What is musical dramaturgy? ; The drama of the modern era and opera ; The means of musical drama ; Methodological considerations ; Music theater, opera, musical drama -- The libretto and its functions. The librettist's métier ; Fabula and intrigue ; Parola scenica and sounding silence ; Text and "work" -- The theatrical dynamic. The score as production ; The primacy of the present ; Stage music as quotation and reality ; Time structures -- Forms and contents. Number opera as a dramatic form ; The configuration of characters and the action ; Interior and exterior dialogue ; Interior action ; "Pathos" and "ethos" ; Dialogue and duet ; Simultaneity -- Questions of genre. The opera as novel ; Tragedy and the Lieto fine ; Comedy with music and comic opera -- Metrical and formal organization / Paolo Fabbri. Meter and rhythm ; Open form: the prosody of blank verse ; Closed form: the aria ; Recitative and cavata ; From interpolations to the da capo ; Opera in its classical phase: metastasio ; The anti-metastasio opposition and comic opera ; The energy of comedy in opera seria ; Lines with even numbers of syllables in romantic opera ; Asymmetry as the norm -- Opera and Italian literature / Marzio Pieri. The reasons. Opera as a popular national genre ; Orpheus in the underworld, or the rebirth of tragedy in the spirit of the variety show ; "Più dolci affetti": tragedy in pastoral mode ; Forbidden pleasures -- The effects. Adone, or opera before opera ; From the one-sided poem to the segmented universe, or opera in purgatory ; Don Giovanni ; Rosina ; Il duca d'Atene ; Re orso ; Ulisse -- The dissemination and popularization of opera / Roberto Leydi. The myth of popularity. Preliminary observations ; The Phantom of the Opera ; Bellini's spinners and Verdi's crockery seller (or baked-pear seller) ; Donizetti (or Bellini) at all costs -- Opera and folk culture. Cimarosa on your shoulders as you wander the world ; Opera becomes a big stew ; How Verdi saved the anarchist from the gallery ; Long live the band ; The village music lover and violetta in church ; Radames, a.k.a. Baratieri ; The wooden-headed prima donna -- Opera outside the opera house. Reading opera, at home and in public ; Opera in boxes, small and large ; Signor Galbiati takes opera home with him ; The Hammy baritone, Maestro Muddle, Dinetta, and Margherita, who is not who she was -- Opera in Italian national culture / Giovanni Morelli. The question of popularity ; The unobtainable cultural character of the new nation ; Hybrids of old and new ; How and why Italian literature did not become popular in Italy ; A mission for opera ; A cultural impasse becomes an artistic stance ; Sublimations of the subculture ; Semblances of unity ; Opera goes out of character. |
| Review |
This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlhaus offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera. |
| General note | Translation of: Teorie e tecniche immagini e fantasmi. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Language | Translated from the Italian. |
| LCCN | 2003009361 |
| ISBN | 0226045927 |
| ISBN | 9780226045924 |
