Opera Buffa in Mozart's ViennaMary Kathleen Hunter, James Webster Cambridge University Press, 27.11.1997 - 459 Seiten 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. This book 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. The author 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, the author shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cosi fan tutte as 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. |
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
action aesthetic Allanbrook Allegro analysis analytical Andante Aprite aria audience barbiere di Siviglia Benucci bourgeois buffa aria buffo Burgtheater Bussani cadence Cambridge Carlo Goldoni characters clemenza di Tito comedy comic opera composers cont contemporary context conventions Così fan tutte Curiazi Despina dominant Don Alfonso Don Giovanni dramatic dramma giocoso duet ensembles essay Example finale finta Fiordiligi French genre Goldoni Guglielmo Haydn's Heartz high style instrumental music Italian La finta giardiniera Leporello librettist libretto lieto Mandini Masetto middle style Milady moral movement Mozart's Operas nozze di Figaro opera buffa opera seria opere buffe Ottavio overture Paisiello Pamela pastoral patter pensando performed peripeteia play plot Ponte operas Ponte's rara repertory rhetoric Rhythmic Gesture role Salieri scene Sedaine sentimental Sesto set pieces sextet sing singers social stage stanza suggests tessitura theatre theatrical tion tonal tonic University Press Venice Vienna W. A. Mozart Webster