Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform (pdf)

Description

French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre’s first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a given opera’s creators and audiences. Margaret Butler’s Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century.