Opera's Orbit: Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome

Description

Exploring the dynamic yet problematic context of musical drama in Rome, this study probes opera's relationship to modernity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Opera instigated a range of discourses, most notably among Rome's Academy of Arcadians, whose apprehension towards opera refracted larger aesthetic and cultural debates, and socio-political tensions. Tcharos presents a unique perspective, engaging opera as a historical force that established a sphere of influence across several genres and matrices of culture. The juxtaposition of opera against the prominent forms of the oratorio, serenata and cantata illustrates opera's constitutive role in a trans-genre cultural matrix, where the dialogical connections between musico-dramatic forms vividly capture the historicism, nostalgia, contradiction and cultural reform that opera inspired. By illuminating other genres as reactionary sites of music and drama, Opera's Orbit boldly reconstructs opera's eighteenth-century critical turn.

Stefanie Tcharos is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she specializes in early modern Italian opera and related dramatic vocal music, issues of aesthetics, cultural history, and genre theory. She has published articles and reviews in the Journal of Musicology, the Cambridge Opera Journal, and Music and Letters, and was a contributor to The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (2009).

'An interesting survey of an intriguing period, with plenty of guidance for further investigation.' Opera