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Sentimental Opera is a study of the relationship between opera and two major phenomena of eighteenth-century European culture - the cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama. A thorough examination of social and cultural contexts helps to explain the success of operas such as Paisiello's Nina as well as the extreme emotional reactions of their audiences. Like their counterparts in drama, literature and painting, these works brought to the fore serious contemporary problems including the widespread execution of deserters, the treatment of the insane, and anxieties relative to social and familial roles. They also developed a specifically operatic version of the dominant language of sensibility. This wide-ranging study involves such major cultural figures as Goldoni, Diderot and Mozart, while refining our understanding of the theatrical genre system of their time.

In discussing those passages of an opera in which not only the audience but also the characters of the story hear music, musicologists often write of “diegetic” music, adopting well-established terminology from film studies and narratology. The terms “diegesis” and “diegetic” stem from ancient Greek, and owe their long-standing fortune to their presence in seminal writings by Plato and Aristotle; scholars of narrative, drama, film, and music occasionally note, however, that the meaning assumed by “diegesis” and “diegetic” in recent decades is very different from (or even opposite to) the historical one. In fact, the two meanings coexist in current scholarly usage, engendering terminological (and therefore conceptual) confusion. The goal of this article is to explain how this situation came about. Ancient Greece witnessed the emergence of the basic narratological distinction between recounting and enacting, and its gradual (and far from straightforward) association with the terminological distinction between “diegesis” and “mimesis.” A misinterpretation of Aristotle by French filmologues around 1950 gave rise to the modern meaning of “diegesis” (“storyworld,” or even simply “story”), while the misapprehension by which the ancient and modern terminologies are deemed to have arisen entirely independently of each other originates in the influential work of narratologist Gérard Genette. The story reconstructed here involves to-ing and fro-ing between words and concepts: what may appear as a purely lexical study is also, of necessity, a study about ideas. Moreover, this story might serve more generally as an apologue, reminding us of the sometimes peculiar ways in which bits of our collective wisdom emerge and become accepted.

The recent work of historians and musicologists on Restoration Italy illustrates the complexity of the relationship between opera and society, allowing us to leave behind simplistic claims about either the 'revolutionary' role of Italian opera or its political irrelevance. From a perspective closer to that of mentality history, the question to what extent a particular composer was 'revolutionary' may take new directions, and even become irrelevant altogether. Reprinted by permission of the MIT Press

The recent work of historians and musicologists on Restoration Italy illustrates the complexity of the relationship between opera and society, allowing us to leave behind simplistic claims about either the \"revolutionary\" role of Italian opera or its political irrelevance. From a perspective closer to that of mentality history, the question to what extent a particular composer was \"revolutionary\" may take new directions, and even become irrelevant altogether. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The recent work of historians and musicologists on Restoration Italy illustrates the complexity of the relationship between opera and society, allowing us to leave behind simplistic claims about either the \"revolutionary\" role of Italian opera or its political irrelevance. From a perspective closer to that of mentality history, the question to what extent a particular composer was \"revolutionary\" may take new directions, and even become irrelevant altogether.

The article explores the complex relationship between Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and aspects of eighteenth-century sentimental culture. On the one hand, the opera parodies recognizable elements of that culture, thus joining a well-established anti-sentimental trend (an attitude largely inherited from its literary source, Beaumarchais's comedy Le Mariage de Figaro). In other respects, however, Le nozze di Figaro can be seen to make a direct appeal to sentiment. The tension between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental is one of the driving forces behind this work, and one of the most fascinating aspects of an entire epoch in European culture.

Paisiello's Nina ‘is sentimental comedy at its worst…. Its sentimentality is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies.’ Edward Dent's opinion might well be shared, though perhaps less frankly expressed, by more than one musicologist of following generations. Yet the fact remains that eighteenth-century Europe was indeed reduced to tears by operas on the story of Nina: an attempt to ‘thicken’ our understanding of that cultural phenomenon is the aim of the present essay. In its first part – focusing on Marsollier's and Dalayrac's Nina, the source for Paisiello's opera – I try to reconstruct a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. In the second part, aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of ‘sensibility’ shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians.

The article explores the complex relationship between Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and aspects of eighteenth-century sentimental culture. On the one hand, the opera parodies recognizable elements of that culture, thus joining a well-established anti-sentimental trend (an attitude largely inherited from its literary source, Beaumarchais's comedy Le Mariage de Figaro). In other respects, however, Le nozze di Figaro can be seen to make a direct appeal to sentiment. The tension between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental is one of the driving forces behind this work, and one of the most fascinating aspects of an entire epoch in European culture.