Staging 'Euridice': Theatre, Sets, and Music in Late Renaissance Florence

Description

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be studied in the abstract rather than as something to be performed in a specific time and place. Staging "Euridice" explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti. By also taking into account what the singers and instrumentalists did, what the audience saw and heard, and how things changed from creation through rehearsals to performance, this book brings new aspects of Euridice to light in startling ways.

Tim Carter is David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of numerous books on topics ranging from Monteverdi to Rodgers and Hammerstein. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the National Humanities Center. Francesca Fantappie has published widely on Italian theatre from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on dramaturgy, music, stagecraft and scenography, architecture, and performers. She is a former fellow of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence and currently holds a Marie Curie Fellowship in the Centre d'Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance, Universite de Tours.