Goldoni as Librettist

Goldoni as Librettist
Author: Ted Emery
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1991
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) is widely recognized as one of Italy's finest playwrights, but his production for the operatic theatre is much less well known. While musicologists have established the importance of Goldoni's innovations in the form of the comic libretto, literary scholars have tended to see the drammi giocosi as at best a pale reflection of the plays, and at worst a distortion of the «real» Goldoni. In Goldoni as Librettist, Emery traces the complex web of relationships between plays and libretti, illustrating the ways in which the author used his operas to prepare for the comedies, or to experiment with themes to which the plays were closed. This reading of Goldoni's operatic texts not only confirms their status as a form of literary activity, but also allows us to more fully understand Goldoni's development as a playwright.

The Librettist of Venice

The Librettist of Venice
Author: Rodney Bolt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2008-12-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1596919825

In 1805, Lorenzo Da Ponte was the proprietor of a small grocery store in New York. But since his birth into an Italian Jewish family in 1749, he had already been a priest, a poet, the lover of many women, a scandalous Enlightenment thinker banned from teaching in Venice, the librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime operas, a collaborator with Salieri, a friend of Casanova, and a favorite of Emperor Joseph II. He would go on to establish New York City's first opera house and be the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. An inspired innovator but a hopeless businessman, who loved with wholehearted loyalty and recklessness, Da Ponte was one of the early immigrants to live out the American dream. In Rodney Bolt's rollicking and extensively researched biography, Da Ponte's picaresque life takes readers from Old World courts and the back streets of Venice, Vienna, and London to the New World promise of New York City. Two hundred and fifty years after Mozart's birth, the life and legacy of his librettist Da Ponte are as astonishing as ever.

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution
Author: Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2011-03-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0521897084

Polzonetti reveals how revolutionary America inspired eighteenth-century European audiences, and how it can still inspire and entertain us.

Opera

Opera
Author: Guy A. Marco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 655
Release: 2002-05-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113557801X

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Opera in the Age of Rousseau

Opera in the Age of Rousseau
Author: David Charlton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2012-10-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0521887607

A wide-ranging account of opera on stage and in society in the age of Rousseau, from Rameau to Gluck.

Pagodas in Play

Pagodas in Play
Author: Adrienne Ward
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2010
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0838756964

Pagodas in Play analyzes the treatment of China in the imaginative and spectacular world of eighteenth-century Italian opera. It shows how Italians used perceptions of Chinese culture to address local and transnational developments, particularly Enlightenment and secular reform initiatives. Its focus on the texts and performance practices of opera, an entertainment form accessible to a wide public, reveals cultural operations and identities harder to detect in non-fictional reformist writings, the texts traditionally privileged to explain Italian mediations of Enlightenment ideas. In its close reading of nine libretti of the most salient Settecento operas treating China (opere serie and opere buffe by authors including Metastasio, Zeno, Goldoni and Lorenzi), Pagodas in Play differentiates Italian iterations of Chinese culture from French and English counterparts. It further challenges certain tenets of orientalism, showing how it operates when nationalist and/or colonialist projects are absent, and how orientalist practices in eighteenth-century Italy exhibit early on the complexity some scholars locate only in the twentieth century. Adrienne Ward teaches Italian literature and culture at the University of Virginia.

Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi

Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi
Author: Blair Hoxby
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2024-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487518099

Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.