Martha Feldman: Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century's most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period's social and political upheavals. Taking an anthropological approach to European music that's as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera's shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms an. Evenings at the opera. Opera seria, sovereignty, performance ; Ritual and event ; Magic and myth ; Public opinion ; Evolutions ; Crisis and involution -- Arias : form, feeling, exchange. Ritornello form as rhetorical exchange ; The singer as Magus ; Rubbing into magic ; Frame -- 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 -- Festivity and time. Time and the calendar ; Festive realms, festive spaces ; Unbridling the Holy City ; Laughter, ridicule, critique ; Nature revisited ; Appendix : edict on abuses in the theater, Rome, January 4, 1749. 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 -- Myths of sovereignty. Of myth and the mythographer ; Themistocles, hero ; History as myth ; Sovereigns and two heroes ; The exemplary prince and the loyal son : Artaxerxes and Arbaces ; The conquering lover-king : Alexander the Great ; A hapless emperor : Hadrian ; Proud hero and imperial autocrat : Aetius and Valentinian III ; The king cometh ; Bataille's sovereigns : a postscript on identification. 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 -- Morals and malcontents. Dedications to ladies ; Conversations and femiuomini ; Regarding the senses : continuity, accordance, truth ; The family of opera -- Death of the sovereign, Venice, 1797: fourth case study. The death of time ; Opera in a democratic ascension ; Pratile, June 4 ; La morte di Mitridate ; Summer season : Caesar, Brutus, and Joan of Arc ; Moralizing the spectator.