Opera's Orbit
Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome

Tcharos illustrates opera's engagement in a larger musical sphere of Arcadian Rome, where opera inspired debate and fuelled ideological reform.

Stefanie Tcharos (Author)

9780521116657, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 February 2011

334 pages, 8 b/w illus. 9 music examples
25.4 x 18.3 x 2 cm, 0.82 kg

'An interesting survey of an intriguing period, with plenty of guidance for further investigation.' Opera

Exploring the dynamic yet problematic context of musical drama in Rome, this study probes opera's relationship to modernity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Opera instigated a range of discourses, most notably among Rome's Academy of Arcadians, whose apprehension towards opera refracted larger aesthetic and cultural debates, and socio-political tensions. Tcharos presents a unique perspective, engaging opera as a historical force that established a sphere of influence across several genres and matrices of culture. The juxtaposition of opera against the prominent forms of the oratorio, serenata and cantata illustrates opera's constitutive role in a trans-genre cultural matrix, where the dialogical connections between musico-dramatic forms vividly capture the historicism, nostalgia, contradiction and cultural reform that opera inspired. By illuminating other genres as reactionary sites of music and drama, Opera's Orbit boldly reconstructs opera's eighteenth-century critical turn.

Introduction. Opera's orbit
1. Enclosures, crises, polemics: opera production in 1690s Arcadian Rome
2. Disrupting the oratorio
3. The serenata's discourses of duality
4. The cantata, the pastoral, and the ideology of nostalgia
5. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Opera [AVGC9], Classical music [c 1750 to c 1830 AVGC4]