THE CULTURE OF OPERA BUFFA IN MOZART'S VIENNA by Mary Hunter ( 9780691058122 )

Item Details

Title:

THE CULTURE OF OPERA BUFFA IN MOZART'S VIENNA
A POETICS OF ENTERTAINMENT

By:

Mary Hunter

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£109.00

Our price:

£87.20

Discount:

20% off

You save:

£21.80

ISBN 10:

0691058121

ISBN 13:

9780691058122

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Stock:

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Publisher:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

12 April, 1999

Series:

Princeton Studies in Opera

Pages:

312

Description:

Offers a view of opera buffa in the theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. This book attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide 'sheer' pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. It shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits.

Synopsis:

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cos" fan tutte as a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

Illustrations:

54 music examples

Publication:

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Prizes:

Winner of American Musicological Society's Otto Kinkeldey Prize for best Joint winner of Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society

Returns:

Returnable

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