eBook

The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna

Mary Hunter

1999

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: 18th century / Aesthetics of music / Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung / Aria / Arlecchino (opera) / Austria / Burgtheater / Carlo Goldoni / Castrato / Cavatina / Chiaroscuro (music) / Coloratura / Comic opera / Composer / Constanze Mozart / Don Giovanni / Don Giovanni Tenorio / Don Pasquale / Dramma giocoso / Elopement (marriage) / Euridice (Peri) / Farce / Ferdinando Paer / Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode / Francesco Benucci / Genre / Gli equivoci / Grand duke / H. C. Robbins Landon / Idomeneo / Il matrimonio segreto / Il mondo della luna / Insertion aria / Intermezzo / Italian opera / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / Joseph von Sonnenfels / La grotta di Trofonio / La Scala / Leopold Mozart / Libretto / Melodic pattern / Melodramma / Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791 / Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. Operas / MUSIC / MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera / Music of France / Musical theatre / Musicality / Narcissism / Oboe / Opera / Opera -- Austria -- Vienna -- 18th century / Opera buffa / Opera seria / Operas / Orchestra / Orfeo ed Euridice / Parody / Phrase (music) / Piano-vocal score / Program music / Ritornello / Se vuol ballare / Sentimentalism (literature) / Singing / Singspiel / Soubrette / Sturm und Drang / Tarare (opera) / The Human Comedy (musical) / The Magic Flute / The Marriage of Figaro / The New Grove Dictionary of Opera / Travesti (theatre) / Tutti / Vienna / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• ISBN: 0691058121, 9780691058122, 1400822750, 9781400822751