La Serva Onorata Part 1

La serva onorata, Part 1

In September 1792 the Neapolitan Teatro dei Fiorentini hosted the performance of a new dramma giocoso by Niccolò Piccinni, titled La serva onorata, which has never been revived in modern times. The libretto was a reelaboration by Giambattista Lorenzi of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Le nozze di Figaro, set to music by Mozart six years before. The work and the Viennese masterpiece show many concurrences, but Lorenzi’s text is marked by a different tone and a radical restructuring—a reduction from four to two acts and from eleven to six characters, as well as the elimination of the chorus. In it a mature Piccinni, just returned to Italy after the long stay in Paris, proves capable of writing a refined score and of showcasing the skills of his singers, among them the famous buffo Antonio Casaccia in the role of Nardillo Barracca, corresponding to that of Figaro.

Music, Society, Agency

Musicologists have increasingly taken a wide-angled lens on the study of music in society, to explore how it can be intertwined with issues of politics, gender, religion, race, psychology, memory, and space. Recent studies of music in connection with society take in a variety of musical phenomena from diverse periods and genres—medieval, classical, opera, rock, etc. This ten-chapter book not only asks how music and society are, and have been, intertwined and mutually influential, but it also examines the agents behind these connections: who determines musical cultures in society? Which social groups are represented in particular musical contexts? Which social groups are silenced or less well represented in music’s histories, and why?

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