Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage [Hardcover]

Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes'Lysistratais included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

1. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: the Institutions of Greco-Roman Theatre and the Development of European Opera,Roger Savage
2. Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manque,Michele Napolitano
3. Incidental Music and the Revival of Greek Tragedy from the Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism,Jason Geary
4. Phaedra's Handmaiden: Tragedy as Comedy and Spectacle in Seventeenth-Century Opera,Wendy Heller
5. Dance in Lully's Alceste,Jennifer Thorp
6. The Ghost of Alcestis,Amy Wygant
7. The Rise and Fall of Andromache on the Operatic Stage, 1660s-1820s,Suzana Ograjensek
8. Opera Librettos and Greek Tragedy in Eighteenth-Century Venice: The Case of Agostino Piovene,Robert C. Ketterer
9. Ancient Tragedy in Opera, and the Operatic Debut of Oedipus the King (Munich, 1729),Reinhard Strohm
10. Establishing a text, securing a reputation: Metastasio's Use of Aristotle,Michael Burden
11. The Gods outlF