This addition to the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series is also the first full-length study of Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail. It aims to familiarize the reader with all aspect of the work: Mozart's writing of the opera and its literary antecedents, its plot, its musical structure, its reception and performance history. The reader will find much that is new in Thomas Bauman's study. He discusses the opera in relation to other Oriental operas, in the light of eighteenth-centruy apprehensions of the East, and as an attempt to reconcile the conventions of German opera in the early 1780s...

This is the first collection of essays to explore the wide dimensions and influence of eighteenth-century opera. In a series of fresh articles by leading scholars in the field, new perspectives are offered on the important figures of the day, including Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Rameau and Mozart, and on the fundamental problems of creation, revision, borrowing, influence and intertextuality. Allied arts, notably painting, the novel, ballet, and the spoken stage are also examined in their relationship to the development of opera. The book contains numerous rare illustrations, and will be of...