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Fantasizing about the Ancients Fantasizing about the Ancients
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Antichi e Moderni Antichi e Moderni
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Wrinkles in Time: Anachronistic Encounters Wrinkles in Time: Anachronistic Encounters
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The Legacy of the Debate The Legacy of the Debate
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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12 Opera between the Ancients and the Moderns
Get accessWendy Heller is Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Italian Studies at Princeton University. She is a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. Author of Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (California, 2004), Heller has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, of the Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies), and the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is also the author of Music in the Baroque and Anthology of Music in the Baroque (both for W. W. Norton, 2013), and is completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy.
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Published:07 April 2015
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Abstract
This chapter situates opera in the context of the battle between the ancients and the moderns that was waged particularly in the realm of literature during the critical years of the genre’s development in Italy. Taking into account the writings of such champions of modernity as Tassoni, Lancellotti, and Boccalini, as well as examples from mid-seventeenth-century Venice, the chapter proposes that opera’s expressive power is a result not so much of its relative success or failure in adhering to the humanist ideals of its Florentine creators, so embedded in operatic historiography, but rather in the perennial tension between ancient precepts and modern fantasies, manifest in the genre’s often playful engagement with anachronism. The chapter concludes with a glimpse at the complex and often contradictory treatment of the ancients in the twentieth century, exemplified by Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Henze’s The Bassarids.
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