Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785

ISBN-13: 9780521801881 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 420 str.

Downing A. Thomas

Opis

This is the first study to recognize the wider picture of opera within early-modern French culture. Downing Thomas considers the place of music within a cultural environment--the employment of music by Louis XIV as a symbol of absolutism; the use of music as a statement against the monarchy; and the long-term development of opera as a reflection of humanism. Thomas examines key works by Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier, among others, and extends his reach from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.

Recenzje

Review of the hardback: '… the attraction and usefulness of this work is that Thomas specifically avoids falling back on hackneyed texts and does not slavishly retrace other's steps through reams of over-analysed material.' Eighteenth-Century Music

Spis treści

Introduction; Part I. French Opera in the Shadow of Tragedy: 1. Song as performance and the emergence of French opera; 2. The opera king; 3. The ascendance of music and the disintegration of the hero in Armide; 4. The disruption of poetics I: Medee's excessive voice; 5. The disruption of poetics II: Hippolyte et Aricie and the reinvention of tragedy; Part II: Opera and Enlightenment: From Private Sensation to Public Feeling: 6. Heart strings; 7. Music, sympathy, and identification at the Opéra-Comique; 8. Architectural visions of lyric theater and spectatorship; 9. Opera and common sense: Lacépède's Poetique de la musique; Conclusions; Works Cited; Index.