Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama

by Stefano Castelvecchi

Overview

Sentimental Opera is a study of the relationship between opera and two major phenomena of eighteenth-century European culture - the cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama. A thorough examination of social and cultural contexts helps to explain the success of operas such as Paisiello's Nina as well as the extreme emotional reactions of their audiences. Like their counterparts in drama, literature and painting, these works brought to the fore serious contemporary problems including the widespread execution of deserters, the treatment of the insane, and anxieties relative to social and familial roles. They also developed a specifically operatic version of the dominant language of sensibility. This wide-ranging study involves such major cultural figures as Goldoni, Diderot and Mozart, while refining our understanding of the theatrical genre system of their time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107460232
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/24/2013
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Opera
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	14 MB
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About the Author

Stefano Castelvecchi is Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. He has published critical editions of works by Rossini and Verdi and various articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian opera. His edition of Abramo Basevi's The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi (1859) is forthcoming.

Table of Contents

Preface; A prologue on genre; 1. Pamela goes to the opera; 2. The emergence of bourgeois drama; 3. The codification of bourgeois drama; 4. Opera as drame; 5. Sensibility and the moral cure; 6. A sentimental opera; 7. Sentimental, anti-sentimental; 8. Avenues; Appendix: Bartolomeo Benincasa's preface to Il disertore (1784).

Editorial Reviews

'A valuable contribution not only to the study of late eighteenth-century opera but to our awareness of the priorities, absorptions and obsessions of cultured Europe on the eve of the French Revolution.' The Times Literary Supplement

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