Opera in Postwar Venice
Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde

Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

Harriet Boyd-Bennett (Author)

9781316620571, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 September 2021

242 pages, 8 b/w illus. 8 music examples
24.4 x 16.9 x 1.3 cm, 0.43 kg

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

List of figures and music examples
Acknowledgements
Note on translations
Introduction
1. Stravinsky's timely excavations, 1951
2. A Futura Memoria: Verdi's Attila, 1951
3. Spectral opera: Britten's The Turn of the Screw, 1954
4. Magic and realism in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel, 1955
5. Open works/staging crisis, 1959
6. Noisy echoes in Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960, 1961
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Opera [AVGC9], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6]