Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these ...controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).
Digital technologies today are seen as a powerful driving force of creative industry growth. The authors reveal the development of operatic theatre as a significant entity of a new market reality - ...the economy of impressions. Notwithstanding the fact that the majority of opera houses are state funded, the issue of economic efficacy is gaining relevance for theaters; increasingly more attention is paid to promoting theatrical product. Despite the fact that the eliteness of operatic art and loyalty to tradition poses restrictions on implanting new instruments of theater branding. active digitization of the opera product is the only plausible means of attracting the attention of the new generations who are used to this format of representing cultural content. This dilemma is analyzed in the article on the basis of the data yielded by a field study in the form of a survey involving Russian and Italian opera lovers.
ABSTRACT - Whether one considers it a late extension of the eighteenth century or an integral part of the long nineteenth century, the definition 'Rossinian age' for the years 1800-30, coined by ...Fabrizio Della Seta (1993), has now come into current use. In the conclusion the why is indicated in broad terms: this vexed question may benefit from the use of the linguistic concept of 'economy'. Quando a)Il passaggio tra musica antica e musica moderna (1810-12) Per riguardo alla musica, sia essa pur tartara quanto si voglia che non mi oppongo, mi e paruta in molte sue parti noiosa, perché uniforme, senza nerbo, e senza originalita. Ed in quindici giorni come si puù fare una bella musica, la quale esige sei mesi e forse un anno? E significativo che durante l'epoca napoleonica (e in specie nel Regno d'Italia, il cui trono era occupato nominalmente da Napoleone) si siano intensificati gli interventi pubblici a proposito della musica.
Imagine Armida, Handel's Saracen sorceress, performing her
breakneck coloraturas in a black figure-hugging rubber dress,
beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane,
suspending a ...captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her
dungeon. Mozart's peasant girl Zerlina, meanwhile, is tying up and
blindfolding her fiancé to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don
Giovanni. And how about Wagner's wizard, Klingsor, ensnaring his
choir of flower maidens in elaborate Japanese rope bondage? Opera,
it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For
decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed
canonical operas-from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and
beyond-in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and
fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this
phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion
as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own
configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging
image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an
eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to
take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately,
Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes
about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing
its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.
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