Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Origins and Duecento
- The Trecento
- The Quattrocento
- The Cinquecento
- The Seicento: Poetry, Philosophy and Science
- Narrative prose and theatre
- The Settecento
- 22 The first half of the Settecento
- 23 The theatre from Metastasio to Goldoni
- 24 Opera
- 25 The Enlightenment and Parini
- 26 Alfieri and pre-Romanticism
- The Age of Romanticism (1800–1870)
- The Literature of United Italy (1870–1910)
- The Rise and Fall of Fascism (1910–45)
- The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–56)
- Contemporary Italy (since 1956)
- Bibliography
- References
24 - Opera
from The Settecento
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Origins and Duecento
- The Trecento
- The Quattrocento
- The Cinquecento
- The Seicento: Poetry, Philosophy and Science
- Narrative prose and theatre
- The Settecento
- 22 The first half of the Settecento
- 23 The theatre from Metastasio to Goldoni
- 24 Opera
- 25 The Enlightenment and Parini
- 26 Alfieri and pre-Romanticism
- The Age of Romanticism (1800–1870)
- The Literature of United Italy (1870–1910)
- The Rise and Fall of Fascism (1910–45)
- The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–56)
- Contemporary Italy (since 1956)
- Bibliography
- References
Summary
Dramma per musica and opera buffa
For all its vitality and popularity, seventeenth-century opera had found few articulate apologists and was sustained by little in the way of intellectual or philosophical underpinning. The advent of an era of weighty theorists and historians of literature – Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, Quadrio – all inspired by ideas of renovation and reform, boded ill for those who cherished opera in its Seicento guise. These men, not generally much interested in opera for its own sake, perceived its development largely, if not entirely, through the libretti, and for those of the second half of the seventeenth century they had conceived a profound contempt. Their views are vividly represented in the writings of a theorist, Stefano Arteaga, who did care for opera, and who discerned in that of the seventeenth century nothing but a ‘gross chaos, a concoction of sacred and profane, of historical and fabulous, of mythology ancient and modern, of true and allegorical, of natural and fantastic, all gathered together to the perpetual shame of art’. In an age when the Arcadians were aiming, as Muratori suggested, to reform the arts and sciences ‘for the benefit of the Catholic religion, for the glory of Italy, and for public and private profit’, opera could not escape fresh and fundamental scrutiny. Throughout the eighteenth century its development was to be conditioned by the educative ambitions of the poets and by their determination to reinstate Aristotelian aesthetics.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Italian Literature , pp. 363 - 370Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997