Mozart's Così Fan Tutte

Mozart's Così Fan Tutte

Author: Ian Woodfield

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1843834065

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A groundbreaking new approach proposes answers to many of the opera's unresolved questions.


Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte

Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte

Author: Dr Charles Ford

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-01-28

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1409495434

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Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.


Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Author: Kristi Brown-Montesano

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0520385799

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Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.


Mozart's Women

Mozart's Women

Author: Jane Glover

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0330470507

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Mozart was fascinated, amused, aroused, hurt, and betrayed by women. He loved and respected them, composed for them, performed with them. This unique biography looks at his interaction with each, starting with his family (his mother, Maria Anna and beloved and talented sister, Nannerl), and his marriage (which brought his 'other family', the Weber sisters). His relationships with his artists are examined, in particular those of his operas, through whose characters Mozart gave voice to the emotions of women who were, like his entire female acquaintance, restrained by the conventions and structures of eighteenth-century society. This is their story as well as his -- and shows once again that a great part of the composer’s genius was in his understanding and musical expression of human nature. Evocative and beautifully written, Mozart’s Women illuminates the music, the man, and above all the women who inspired him. 'Jane Glover has pulled off a coup des livres with her fresh take on Mozart's life and work’ Sunday Telegraph ‘Readable, informative and moving...Her passion for the music shines through this touching, vividly told story' Sunday Times


W. A. Mozart: Così Fan Tutte

W. A. Mozart: Così Fan Tutte

Author: Bruce Alan Brown

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-11-24

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780521437356

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At once the most light-hearted and disturbing of Mozart and Da Ponte's Italian comic works, the opera has provoked widely differing reactions from listeners for more than two centuries. This study provides a detailed account of the libretto's complex origins in myth and Italian literary classics.


Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Author: Sheila Hodges

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2002-06-15

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0299178730

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Three of the greatest operas ever written—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—join the exquisite music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte’s own long life (1749–1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet, and librettist of genius who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became professor of Italian at Columbia University—wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III’s London to New York City.


Mozart's The Magic Flute

Mozart's The Magic Flute

Author: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Publisher: Opera Journeys Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 0977145506

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A comprehensive guide to Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with German/English translation side-by side, and over 30 music highlight examples.


The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna

The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna

Author: Mary Hunter

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-04-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1400822750

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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.