Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment

by Mary Hunter
Save 6% Save 6%
Current price ₹13,584.00
Original price ₹14,406.00
Original price ₹14,406.00
Original price ₹14,406.00
(-6%)
₹13,584.00
Current price ₹13,584.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780691058122
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Princeton University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 312
  • Original Price: USD 147.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 645 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Genres & Styles / Opera

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions.

Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cos" fan tutte as a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

Mary Hunter is Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She is the editor, with James Webster, of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us