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Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide \"sheer\" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the \"merely entertaining\" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discussesCos\" fan tutteas a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

Ferdinando Paer (1771-1839) occupies a confusing place in musical history. Hugely popular in his day, he effectively forms a link between Mozart and Rossini. Paer primarily considered himself a rival to Beethoven, however, and his floridly Italianate music strives for the moral loftiness of his greater contemporary.

Siface, Sofonisba's husband, is stylishly sung by tenor Paul Nilon, and there are pleasing performances by Colin Lee, Lucy Crowe and Mirco Palazzi, with Marco Guidarini conducting a lively account of the orchestral score. The neglect of [Ferdinando Paer]'s music, on the evidence of these highlights, is an injustice. As usual, the scholarly booklet is beautifully produced. Strongly recommended to those with a taste for off-the-beaten-track opera.Recorded at two concerts last year, these are excellent performances by this French quartet who have been together since they were students at the Paris Conservatoire in 1984. Early work it may be, but Debussy's only quartet shows how revolutionary he could be in a traditional medium and yet conform to time-honoured methods. This performance stresses the structural power and novelty of the work and at the same time underlines the haunting beauty of sound in the slow movement. Lovely playing, and there is more of it in Faur's E minor quartet, his last work.

Brzoska reviews Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis der Werk Ferdinando Paers (PaWV ), vol. 1: Die Opern by Wolfram Ensslin.

[Leonora] materialized as a hybrid of a work on September 10, when it opened Zurich Opera House's 2000-01 season, at the Municipal Theater Winterthur. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera attributes the operas libretto to Giovanni Schmidt, but Zurich claims that its Dresden original libretto names Giacomo Cinti as author.

The following two books by Ensslin are reviewed: (1) \"Die italienischen Opern Ferdinando Paërs\"; and (2) \"Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke Ferdinando Paërs.\"

A recording of orchestral music by Ferdinando Paër, Enjott Schneider, Charles-Marie Widor, Jean Langlais, and Johann Sebastian Bach performed by organist Franz Hank and the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, Ingolstadt under conductor Markus Poschner is reviewed (Guild).