The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain
Author: Thomas McGeary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2013-04-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 110700988X

Thomas McGeary's book explores the relationship between Italian opera and British partisan politics in the era of George Frideric Handel.

Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705-1714

Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705-1714
Author: Thomas McGeary
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN: 1783277157

Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.

The Cultural Politics of Opera, 1720-1742

The Cultural Politics of Opera, 1720-1742
Author: Thomas McGeary
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1837651698

Explores the intersection of the world of opera, literature and partisan politics to show how Italian opera was put to use in the 'culture wars' of the day. This last of a trilogy of books on opera and politics in Britain examines the cultural politics of opera during the ministerial reign of Sir Robert Walpole from 1720 to 1742. The book explores the intersection of the world of opera, literature, and partisan politics to show how Italian opera - with its associations with the court, ministry and Britain's social-political elite - was put to use in the 'culture wars' of the day: how Italian opera was used for partisan political advantage; how political work could be accomplished by means of opera. It shows that attacks on opera had ulterior targets. The book surveys a range of often overlooked verse and prints to show how critique or satire of opera were a means for oppositional writers to delegitimize the Walpole ministry. Polemicists framed opera as a consequence of the corruption, luxury and False Taste generated by Walpole's ministry. It closes in the watershed year 1742: Handel had produced the last of his Italian operas the previous year, Walpole fell from power, and Alexander Pope published the last book of his Dunciad project.

A Poetics of Handel's Operas

A Poetics of Handel's Operas
Author: Nathan Link
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197651364

What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.

The Lives of George Frideric Handel

The Lives of George Frideric Handel
Author: David Hunter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1783270616

How have Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories moulded our understanding of the musician, the man and the icon?

Political Aesthetics

Political Aesthetics
Author: Karl Axelsson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350077771

Providing a gateway to a new history of modern aesthetics, this book challenges conventional views of how art's significance developed in society. The 18th century is often said to have involved a radical transformation in the concept of art: from the understanding that it has a practical purpose to the modern belief that it is intrinsically valuable. By exploring the ground between these notions of art's function, Karl Axelsson reveals how scholars of culture made taste, morals and a politically stable society integral to their claims about the experience of nature and art. Focusing on writings by two of the most prolific men of letters in the 18th century, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Axelsson contests the conviction that modern aesthetic autonomy reoriented the criticism and philosophy originally prompted by these two key figures in the history of aesthetics. By re-examining the political relevance of Addison and Shaftesbury's theories of taste, Axelsson shows that first and foremost they sought to fortify a natural link between aesthetic experience and modern political society.

Killing Hercules

Killing Hercules
Author: Richard Rowland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317109082

This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?

Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts

Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts
Author: David Punter
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2019-08-05
Genre: Art, Gothic
ISBN: 1474432379

The Gothic is a contested and complicated phenomenon, extending over many centuries and across all the arts. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the range of essays run from medieval architecture and design to contemporary gaming and internet fiction; from classical painting to the modern novel; from ballet and dance to contemporary Goth music. The contributors include many of the best-known critics of the Gothic (e.g., Hogle, Punter, Spooner, Bruhm) as well as newer names such as Kirk and Round. The editor has put all these contributors in touch with each other in the preparation of their essays in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the reader by producing a well-integrated book which will prove much more than a collection of disparate essays, but rather a distinctive contribution to a field.

Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean

Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean
Author: Giulia Delogu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2024-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040093493

How did free trade emerge in early-modern times? How did the Mediterranean as a specific region – with its own historical characteristics – produce a culture in which the free port appeared? What was the relation between the type of free trade created in early-modern Italy and the development of global trade and commercial competition between states for hegemony in the eighteenth century? And how did the position of the free port, originally a Mediterranean ‘invention’, develop over the course of time? The contributions to this volume address these questions and explain the institutional genealogy of the free port. Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean analyses the atypical history and conditions of the Mediterranean region in contradistinction with other regions as an explanation for how and why free ports arose there. This volume engages with the diffusion of free ports from a Mediterranean to a global phenomenon, whilst staying focused on how this diffusion was experienced in the Mediterranean itself. The contributions to this volume bring together the traditional issues of religious openness and tolerance in physically separated areas and the role of consuls and governors, via fiscal techniques, architectural and administrative aspects, with questions about geopolitical balance and primacy. The book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of historical sub-disciplines (early modern, Mediterranean, global economic, political, and institutional, just to mention a few) and to students wishing to perfect their knowledge of the Mediterranean and its global interconnections, and of the origins of free trade.

Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought

Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought
Author: Ruth Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 1995-05-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0521402654

In this wide-r anging and challenging book, Ruth Smith claims that the words to Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realised. She explores eighteenth-century literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for the thought and sensibility of their time. The book thus enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the close relationship between music and its intellectual contexts.