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.
By:
Mary Hunter
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 13
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 197mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 652g
ISBN: 9780691058122
ISBN 10: 0691058121
Series: Princeton Studies in Opera
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 12 July 1999
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface and AcknowledgmentsEditorial PoliciesAbbreviationsIntroduction3Pt. 1Opera Buffa as EntertainmentCh. 1Opera Buffa as Sheer Pleasure27Ch. 2Opera Buffa's Conservative Frameworks52Ch. 3Opera Buffa's Social Reversals71Pt. 2The Closed Musical Numbers of Opera Buffa and Their Social ImplicationsCh. 4Arias: Some Issues95Ch. 5Class and Gender in Arias: Five Aria Types110Ch. 6Ensembles156Ch. 7Beginning and Ending Together: Introduzioni and Finales196Pt. 3Cosi Fan Tutte le Opere? A Masterwork in ContextCh. 8Cosi fan tutte in Conversation247Ch. 9Cosi fan tutte and Convention273App. 1Operas Consulted299App. 2Musical Forms in Opera Buffa Arias305App. 3Plot Summaries for I finti eredi, Le gare generose, and L'incognita perseguitata309Works Cited313Index323
Mary Hunter is Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She is the editor, with James Webster, of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna.
Reviews for The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment
A major addition to a central topic in Mozart studies. -- Julian Rushton Times Literary Supplement Although opera buffa and Mozart's opera in general have been studied by many scholars and from many points of view, Hunter's work, based on such a large bosy of scores, provides new proofs and a unique focus on the entertainment value of the works. Choice Indisputably the most comprehensive discussion yet published on the repertory of Viennese opera that forms the context for Mozart's comic operas. Eighteenth-Century Studies Hunter's work establishes a pattern for interpreting opera that will surely be imitated. If her thoroughly systematic approach to unraveling meaning in opera is followed in similarly uncompromising, contextual analysis, there is much of eighteenth-century opera, of all kinds and locations, that we will yet learn. This is a marvelous beginning. -- Dale E. Monoson Current Musicology
- Joint winner of Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society 2000 (United States)
- Winner of American Musicological Society's Otto Kinkeldey Prize for best musicological book 2000 (United States)
