Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde

by Harriet Boyd-Bennett

Overview

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316761762
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2018
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Opera
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Harriet Boyd-Bennett is Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. Prior to this she was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Nottingham and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She has published widely on music, culture and politics in Italy, modern opera performance and the musical avant-garde.

Table of Contents

List of figures and music examples; Acknowledgements; Note on translations; Introduction; 1. Stravinsky's timely excavations, 1951; 2. A Futura Memoria: Verdi's Attila, 1951; 3. Spectral opera: Britten's The Turn of the Screw, 1954; 4. Magic and realism in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel, 1955; 5. Open works/staging crisis, 1959; 6. Noisy echoes in Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960, 1961; Bibliography.