Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy

by Martha Feldman

Overview

Performed throughout Europe during the eighteenth century, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant and popular musical art form, engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. In Opera and Sovereignty, Martha Feldman takes a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of the genre. Employing a widely interdisciplinary argument that opera seria must be understood in light of the period’s social and political upheavals, Opera and Sovereignty will continue to interest a broad range of scholars, from musicologists to historians of the Enlightenment.

Opera and Sovereignty traces Italian opera’s shift from asserting sovereignty to fomenting questions about absolute ideals. Against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture, Feldman shows how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in an increasingly democratic world.

“A book of astounding breadth of subject matter, rich source materials, and provocative methodologies.”—Geoffrey Burgess, Current Musicology

“Opera and Sovereignty is a massive achievement.”—Reinhard Strohm, Early Music

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226241135
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Martha Feldman is professor of music at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Editorial Principles

1 EVENINGS AT THE OPERA
   Opera Seria, Sovereignty, Performance
   Ritual and Event
   Magic and Myth
   Public Opinion
   Evolutions
   Crisis and Involution

2 ARIAS: FORM, FEELING, EXCHANGE
   Ritornello Form as Rhetorical Exchange
   The Singer as Magus
   Rubbing into Magic
   Frame

3 PROGRAMMING NATURE, PARMA, 1759: FIRST CASE STUDY
   Enter Nature
   Remaking Viewers
   "Cruel Phaedra!": Ippolito ed Aricia
   Pastoral Redemption, or The Old Order
   Restored
   Appendix: Decree on Audience Behavior, Parma, October 4, 1749

4 FESTIVITY AND TIME
   Time and the Calendar
   Festive Realms / Festive Spaces
   Unbridling the Holy City
   Laughter, Ridicule, Critique
   Nature Revisited
   Appendix: Edict of Abuses in the Theater, Rome, January 4, 1749

5 ABANDONMENTS IN A THEATER STATE, NAPLES 1764: SECOND CASE STUDY
   Compounds of Royalty
   The Sack of the Beggars and the Gift of the King
   Didone abbandonata: Agonism and Exchange
   Apocalyptic Endings

6 MYTHS OF SOVEREIGNTY 
   Of Myth and the Mythographer
   Themistocles, Hero
   History as Myth
   Four Sovereigns and Two Heros
   The Exemplary Prince and the Loyal Son: Artaxerxes and Arbaces
   The Conquering Lover-King: Alexander the Great
   A Hapeless Emperor: Hadrian
   Proud Hero and Imperial Autocrat: Aetius and Valentian III
   The King Cometh
   Bataille's Sovereigns: A Postscript on Identification

7 BOURGEOIS THEATRICS, PERUGIA, 1781: THIRD CASE STUDY
   A Theater for the Middle Class
   What Class is our Genre? Reworking Artaserse
   Whether Purses or Persons
   Toward the Ideology of a Bourgeoisie
   Appendix: Annibale Mariotti's Speech to the Accademia del Teatro Civico del Verzaro, December 31, 1781

8 MORALS AND MALCONTENTS
   Dedications to Ladies
   Conversations and "Femiuomini"
   Regarding the Senses: Continuity, Accordance, Truth
   The Family of Opera

9 DEATH OF THE SOVEREIGN, VENICE, 1797: FOURTH CASE STUDY
   The Death of Time
   Opera in a Democratic Ascension
   16 pratile / June 4
   La morte di Mitridate
   Summer Season: Caesar, Brutus, and Joan of Ark
   Moralizing the Spectator

Epilogue
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"In this dazzling investigation of the vast sociopolitical context of 18th-century opera seria, Feldman provides a detailed quasi-anthropological investigation of the ways in which opera seria reflects and expresses an evolving, ever-shifting concept of sovereignty."

Choice

“Martha Feldman wields her vast array of sources with great intensity and imagination, virtually propelling the reader into a memorable one-on-one experience with the previously unfathomable eighteenth-century world of opera seria in performance. Her anthropological approach is startlingly original and yields powerful insights into how this genre of art music functioned within the sociopolitical dynamics of its time.”

Marita Petzoldt McClymonds

"Superbly researched and brilliantly argued, [the book] is fresh, original, and distinguished by unfailing common sense. This is not to say that its formulations or conclusions are simple. The subject is as subtle as it is capacious: how the operatic genre of opera seria at once contributed to and undercut the mythmaking that sustained political elites. . . . Historians and musicologists alike have much to learn from the vision and ambition of this enterprise."

Journal of Modern History - James H. Johnson

"Opera and Sovereignty is perhaps the most comprehensive study of opera seria to date, and certainly it is unrivalled in the English language. . . . A book of astounding breadth of subject matter, rich source materials, and provocative methodologies. . . . In its richness of ideas, comprehensive coverage of a diversity of opera houses and local practices, multi-layerings of readings, and exhaustive bibliography, this is a truly extraordinary achievement that will offer much to scholars of eighteenth-century opera. This long-awaited revisionist reading of the genre will dominate our understanding of opera seria in eighteenth-century Italy for the forseeable future."

Current Musicology - Geoffrey Burgess

"[A] stimulating book, so full of ideas and wonderfully documented. . . . The breadth of her cultural references, together with her detailed musical, political, socio-anthropological, and biographical analyses, help us to understand—better than any other critical text on the subject—why this genre retained its vitality in Italy, though undergoing subtle modifications, over the entire arc of the eighteenth century."

Musica (Translated from Italian)

"Through the imposing complexity of the book, Martha Feldman highlights the diversity of a genre that reflects or reveals cultural transitions. . . . Social life, audience studies and institutional history are most consistently addressed in this ever-surprising book."

Early Music - Reinhard Strohm

“I know of nothing else like this book. From Feldman I have come to expect a lapidary, loving marriage of source work with deft theoretical framing, and that marriage shines from every page. So seamlessly does she achieve this, indeed, that I am carried along for long stretches by the apparently effortless commonsensicality of it all—until a casual revelation, a sudden unnerving juxtaposition, brings me up short and breathless: something really new is brewing here! Feldman is not the first musicologist to bring together formal analysis, performance theory, and the sensorial elements of musicking; but, for my money, she is the most successful at it so far. As well as providing the most readable and profound treatment of opera seria yet in print, this book should provide musicologists with a peerless model for what analysis can be. I know I will be reacting to it, drawing upon it, half-consciously borrowing from it, and conversing with it for many years to come.”--Elisabeth Le Guin, University of California, Los Angeles

Elisabeth Le Guin

“Opera and Sovereignty is a decidedly original book on dramma per musica and an incisive contribution to the study of musical practices in their cultural contexts. Martha Feldman deftly undoes the opposition between history and myth that is the common understanding of the difference between Italian and French opera of the time. In the end, we are given a compelling story of ambivalent reforms and persistent, but always fluid, operatic forms.”

Downing Thomas

Through the imposing complexity of the book, Martha Feldman highlights the diversity of a genre that reflects or reveals cultural transitions. . . . Social life, audience studies and institutional history are most consistently addressed in this ever-surprising book.

— Reinhard Strohm

Early Music

Superbly researched and brilliantly argued, [the book] is fresh, original, and distinguished by unfailing common sense. This is not to say that its formulations or conclusions are simple. The subject is as subtle as it is capacious: how the operatic genre of opera seria at once contributed to and undercut the mythmaking that sustained political elites. . . . Historians and musicologists alike have much to learn from the vision and ambition of this enterprise.

— James H. Johnson

Journal of Modern History

Opera and Sovereignty is perhaps the most comprehensive study of opera seria to date, and certainly it is unrivalled in the English language. . . . A book of astounding breadth of subject matter, rich source materials, and provocative methodologies. . . . In its richness of ideas, comprehensive coverage of a diversity of opera houses and local practices, multi-layerings of readings, and exhaustive bibliography, this is a truly extraordinary achievement that will offer much to scholars of eighteenth-century opera. This long-awaited revisionist reading of the genre will dominate our understanding of opera seria in eighteenth-century Italy for the forseeable future.

— Geoffrey Burgess

Current Musicology