Italian Opera

Contents

• List of illustrations
• Preface
• A note on Italian prosody
• Map
• Introduction: the Italianness of Italian opera
• Part I . The Origins of Opera:
• 1. The Renaissance intermedi
• 2. The elements of early opera
• 3. The beginnings of opera
• 4. Monteverdi's Orfeo
• Part II . The Venetian Hegemony:
• 5. Opera in seventeenth-century Rome
• 6. Opera comes to Venice
• 7. The nature of Venetian opera
• 8. The development of the musical language
• 9. Cesti's L'Orontea
• Part III . Opera Seria:
• 10. The dramma per musica
• 11. 'Perfection and public favour'
• 12. The performance of opera seria
• 13. The collapse of the Metastasian ideal
• 14. Opera seria in an age of ferment
• 15. A half-century of L'Olimpiade
• Part IV . The Tragedy of Comedy:
• 16. The commedia dell'arte
• 17. Contrascene and intermezzi
• 18. The flowering of comic opera in Naples and Venice
• 19. Apogee and decline
• 20. Il barbiere di Siviglia: Paisiello's and Rossini's settings
• Part V . Romantic Opera:
• 21. Italian Romanticism
• 22. Dramatic themes: the libretto
• 23. The life of the theatre
• 24. The musical language of Italian Romantic opera
• 25. Rossini in Naples
• 26. A franker Romanticism
• 27. The young Verdi
• 28. Bellini's Norma
• Part VI . Cosmopolitanism and Decadence:
• 29. Italian grand opera
• 30. Scapigliati and bohemians
• 31. Verdi and Boito
• 32. Verismo
• Personalia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index.