Opera and sovereignty : transforming myths in eighteenth-century Italy / / Martha Feldman.

• Author: ProQuest (Firm); Feldman, Martha.
• TeilnehmendeR: ProQuest (Firm)
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Physical Description: xxv, 545 p. :; ill. (some col.).

Table of Contents

Evenings at the opera. Opera seria, sovereignty, performance ; Ritual and event ; Magic and myth ; Public opinion ; Evolutions ; Crisis and involution -- Arias : form, feeling, exchange. Ritornello form as rhetorical exchange ; The singer as Magus ; Rubbing into magic ; Frame -- Programming nature, Parma, 1759 : first case study. Enter nature ; Remaking viewers ; Cruel Phaedra! : Ippolito ed Aricia ; Pastoral redemption, or The old order restored ; Appendix : decree on audience behavior, Parma, October 4, 1749 -- Festivity and time. Time and the calendar ; Festive realms, festive spaces ; Unbridling the Holy City ; Laughter, ridicule, critique ; Nature revisited ; Appendix : edict on abuses in the theater, Rome, January 4, 1749 --

Abandonments in a theater state, Naples, 1764 : second case study. Compounds of royalty ; The sack of the beggars and the gift of the king ; Didone abbandonata : agonism and exchange ; Apocalyptic endings -- Myths of sovereignty. Of myth and the mythographer ; Themistocles, hero ; History as myth ; Sovereigns and two heroes ; The exemplary prince and the loyal son : Artaxerxes and Arbaces ; The conquering lover-king : Alexander the Great ; A hapless emperor : Hadrian ; Proud hero and imperial autocrat : Aetius and Valentinian III ; The king cometh ; Bataille's sovereigns : a postscript on identification --

Bourgeois theatrics, Perugia, 1781: third case study. A theater for the middle class ; What class is our genre? : reworking Artaserse ; Whether purses or persons ; Toward the ideology of a bourgeoisie ; Appendix : Annibale Mariotti's speech to the Accademia del Teatro Civico del Verzaro, December 31, 1781 -- Morals and malcontents. Dedications to ladies ; Conversations and femiuomini ; Regarding the senses : continuity, accordance, truth ; The family of opera -- Death of the sovereign, Venice, 1797: fourth case study. The death of time ; Opera in a democratic ascension ; Pratile, June 4 ; La morte di Mitridate ; Summer season : Caesar, Brutus, and Joan of Arc ; Moralizing the spectator.