| Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform Contributor(s): Butler, Margaret (Author) |
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ISBN: 1580469019 ISBN-13: 9781580469012 Publisher: University of Rochester Press OUR PRICE: $94.05 Product Type: Hardcover Published: January 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Music | Genres & Styles - Opera - Drama | European - Italian - History | Modern - 18th Century |
| Dewey: 782.109 |
| LCCN: 2018045783 |
| Series: Eastman Studies in Music |
| Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6" W x 9" (0.95 lbs) 196 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Cultural Region - Italy |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian operas that consciously set out to fuse French and Italian elements, Butler explores Traetta's operas and recreations in Parma of operas and ballets by Jean-Philippe Rameau and other French composers. She shows that Parma's brand of entertainment is one in which Traetta's operas occupy points along a continuum representing a long and rich tradition of adaptation and generic play. Such a reading calls into question the very notion of operatic reform, showing the need for a more flexible conception of a volatile moment in opera's history. The book elucidates the complicated circumstances in which entertainments were created that spoke not only to Parma's multicultural audiences but also to an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe. MARGARET R. BUTLER is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |