The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna : : A Poetics of Entertainment / / Mary Hunter.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Hunter, Mary,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [1999]; ©1999
• Year of Publication: 1999
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in Opera ; 13
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) :; 54 music examples

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. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter 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. Hunter 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, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cos" 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Editorial Policies -- Abbreviations -- INTRODUCTION -- PART ONE: Opera Buffa as Entertainment -- CHAPTER ONE. Opera Buffa as Sheer Pleasure -- CHAPTER TWO. Opera Buffa's Conservative Frameworks -- CHAPTER THREE. Opera Buffa's Social Reversals -- PART TWO: The Closed Musical Numbers of Opera Buffa and Their Social Implications -- CHAPTER FOUR. Arias: Some Issues -- CHAPTER FIVE. Class and Gender in Arias: Five Aria Types -- CHAPTER SIX. Ensembles -- CHAPTER SEVEN. Beginning and Ending Together: Introduzioni and Finales -- PART THREE: Così Fan Tutte le Opere? A Masterwork in Context -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Così fan tutte in Conversation -- CHAPTER NINE. Così fan tutte and Convention -- APPENDIX ONE. Operas Consulted -- APPENDIX TWO. Musical Forms in Opera Buffa Arias -- APPENDIX THREE. Plot Summaries for I finti eredi, Le gare generose, and L'incognita perseguitata -- Works Cited -- Index