Situating Opera
Period, Genre, Reception

Elegantly and engagingly written, this study demonstrates how opera has communicated with its diverse audiences over time.

Herbert Lindenberger (Author)

9780521199896, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 October 2010

324 pages
22.9 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.65 kg

"...very accessible and offer excellent insights into why operas of the 20th century and beyond seem to have a more limited audience than the lyrical dramatic operas of the 19th century." --Choice

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.

Prologue. Why opera? Why (how, where) situate?
1. Anatomy of a war horse: Il trovatore from A to Z
2. On opera and society (assuming a relationship)
3. Opera and the novel: antithetical or complementary?
4. Opera by other means
5. Opera and/as lyric
6. From separatism to unity: aesthetic theorizing from Reynolds to Wagner
7. Toward a characterization of modernist opera
8. Anti-theatricality in twentieth-century opera
9. A brief consumer's history of opera
Epilogue. Why (what, how, if) opera studies?
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Opera [AVGC9], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]