On Jan 12, 2007, at 5:38 PM, John Howell wrote:
Opera was entertainment, and can only be compared with musical
theater today
This is a claim that is made again and again, but on any close
inspection will fall apart. It's clear that Viennese Opera was a form
of entertainment for upper classes, but the entire function of
entertainment is difficult to map one-to-one to mass entertainment
today. Opera was understood as a vehicle for the virtuoso demonstration
of a body of music and cultural conventions and patterns, for technical
innovation within the context of those convention, and also as a civic
and moral instance. The coherence of Opera as a genre depended less on
the coherence of a single opera as a work of music or literature or
theatre than its coherence within a tradition whose conventions and
patterns would be understood by a small audience who returned night
after night, over many years, and who would have recognized the same
conventions and patterns in an elevated literary tradition in which they
read, in sophisticated sacred and secular concerted music they heard,
and in the civic and courtly lives that they led. One might argue that
the _Singspiel_ , with a wider audience, was particularly close to the
musical, but despite its connections to the /Prater/, the very best
examples of Singspiel (/Die Zauberflöte, Die Entführung aus dem Serail/)
clearly have their own moral ambitions.
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