The Transvestite Achilles
The Transvestite Achilles

Author: P. J. Heslin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-08-11

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780521851459

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Offers the first book-length examination of Statius' unfinished epic, the Achilleid.

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Author: Ellen Rosand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-10-09

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 0520254260

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"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy
Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy

Author: Andrew Dell'Antonio

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-07-21

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0520950100

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The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequences—such as tonal music—began to develop, is also notable for another shift: the displacement of aristocratic music-makers by a new professional class of performers. In this book, Andrew Dell’Antonio looks at a related phenomenon: the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing. Drawing from contemporaneous discourses and other commentaries on music, the visual arts, and Church doctrine, Dell’Antonio links the new ideas about cultivated listening with other intellectual trends of the period: humanistic learning, contemplative listening (or watching) as an active spiritual practice, and musical mysticism as an ideal promoted by the Church as part of the Catholic Reformation.

The Baroque Libretto
The Baroque Libretto

Author: Domenico Pietropaolo

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1442641630

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The Baroque Libretto catalogues the Baroque Italian operas and oratorios in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto and offers an analysis of how the study of libretto can inform the understanding of opera.