Feasting And Fasting In Opera

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Feasting & Fasting in Opera

Author: Pierpaolo Polzonetti
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2021-11-11
Feasting and Fasting in Operashows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage. In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.
Feasting and Fasting in Opera

Author: Pierpaolo Polzonetti
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2021-11-11
Convivial beginnings. The symposium and the birth of opera ; The Renaissance banquet as multimedia art ; Orpheus at the cardinal's table ; Eating at the opera house -- "Tastes funny" : tragic and comic meals from Monteverdi to Mozart ; Comedy as embodiment in Monteverdi and Mozart ; The insatiable : tyrants and libertines ; Indulging in comic opera : gastronomy as identity -- The effects of feasting and fasting ; Coffee and chocolate from Bach to Puccini ; Verdi and the laws of gastromusicology ; The Callas diet.
Operatic Geographies

Author: Suzanne Aspden
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2019-04-22
Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.