Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome

Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome
ISBN-10
0520970403
ISBN-13
9780520970403
Category
Music
Pages
328
Language
English
Published
2019-03-05
Publisher
Univ of California Press
Author
Ayana O. Smith

Description

Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism in late seventeenth-century Italian opera, contextualizing the genre amid the broad ocularcentric debates emerging at the crossroads of the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Ayana O. Smith reevaluates significant aspects of the Arcadian reform aesthetic and establishes a historically informed method of opera criticism for modern scholars and interpreters. Unfolding in a narrative fashion, the text explores facets of the philosophical and literary background and concludes with close readings of text and music, using visual symbolism to create readings of gender and character in two operas: Alessandro Scarlatti's La Statira (Rome, 1690), and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's La forza della virtù (Venice, 1693). Smith’s interdisciplinary approach enhances our modern perception of this rich and underexplored repertory, and will appeal to students and scholars not only of opera, but also of literature, philosophy, and visual and intellectual cultures.

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