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Mozart's collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte led to the composition of three of the great masterpieces of opera. This book, designed to guide the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of these enigmatic works, charts the musical, cultural, and social context in which they ...

Mozart's collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte led to the composition of three of the great masterpieces of opera. This book, designed to guide the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of these enigmatic works, charts the musical, cultural, and social context in which they were written--the tastes and expectations of the contemporary opera audience, Mozart's intentions and aspirations in a period of rapid intellectual and political change, Da Ponte's views of opera, and the practical logistics of opera production at the time. Together, these strands provide illuminating insights into Mozart's creative process and the functions of eighteenth-century opera.

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 ...

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.

Published to complement Mozart Studies (published in 1991), Mozart Studies 2 offers a forum for the most important trends in recent Mozart scholarship, including substantial contributions in gender and genre studies, close readings of individual works (among them the `Prague' symphony and Le nozze ...

Published to complement Mozart Studies (published in 1991), Mozart Studies 2 offers a forum for the most important trends in recent Mozart scholarship, including substantial contributions in gender and genre studies, close readings of individual works (among them the `Prague' symphony and Le nozze di Figaro), textual and contextual research and new directions in analysis, both for the operas and instrumental music. At the same time, it also aims to suggest directions for future research. In addition to Cliff Eisen, the contributors include leading Mozart scholars, among them Mary Hunter, John Platoff, Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, and Elaine Sisman.