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A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.
WINNER: 2025 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award (Mozart Society of America)
Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781).
Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."
WINNER: 2025 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award (Mozart Society of America)
Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781).
Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."
Price: $130.00
Pages: 264
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Publication Date:
14 March 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781648250491
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera, Opera, MUSIC / History & Criticism, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, History of music, Music reviews and criticism
A finely crafted interdisciplinary study, that throws light on the intellectual atmosphere of eighteenth century France by investigating the pervasive influence of François Fénelon's novel Télémaque (1699) on literature, the visual arts, and opera, pertinently for this book on the librettos of Mitridate and Idomeneo. The author's extensive exploration of Telemacomania, largely unknown in opera studies, goes far in elucidating aspects of both Mozart operas, particularly Idomeneo.
Exhibition List
Patrons of the Museum
Guidebook A Mozartean Museum
The Death of Tragedy
Exhibiting Enlightenment Dramma per musica
Map of the Exhibits
Entrance Hall Arts, Letters, and Music
Modern Antiquarian Spaces
"La Poésie" and its Systems
Arts and Letters
The Lyrical Impulse
Exhibit A The Poet's Prose: Mitridate
Room 1 Literary Adventures in Télémacomania
Treasonous Popularity
Sensual Lyricism
Tragic Prose on Trial
Opera as Mediator
Room 2 Mitridate's Operatic Poetry
Allegorical Mithridates
Political Mithridates
Operatic Mithridates
Transformative Farnace
Exhibit B Paintings Unseen: Idomeneo
Room 3 Imagi(ni)ng the Prose Epic
Epic Values
Painting Télémaque
Myths Invisible and Unheard
Epic Opera
Room 4 Idomeneo's Operatic Canvas
The Operatic Stage as Canvas
The Composition of an Opera
Portrait of a King
Supernatural Angles
Exit Regrets on Parting
Decorative Luxury
Prose Painting
Declassification
Bookshop
Patrons of the Museum
Guidebook A Mozartean Museum
The Death of Tragedy
Exhibiting Enlightenment Dramma per musica
Map of the Exhibits
Entrance Hall Arts, Letters, and Music
Modern Antiquarian Spaces
"La Poésie" and its Systems
Arts and Letters
The Lyrical Impulse
Exhibit A The Poet's Prose: Mitridate
Room 1 Literary Adventures in Télémacomania
Treasonous Popularity
Sensual Lyricism
Tragic Prose on Trial
Opera as Mediator
Room 2 Mitridate's Operatic Poetry
Allegorical Mithridates
Political Mithridates
Operatic Mithridates
Transformative Farnace
Exhibit B Paintings Unseen: Idomeneo
Room 3 Imagi(ni)ng the Prose Epic
Epic Values
Painting Télémaque
Myths Invisible and Unheard
Epic Opera
Room 4 Idomeneo's Operatic Canvas
The Operatic Stage as Canvas
The Composition of an Opera
Portrait of a King
Supernatural Angles
Exit Regrets on Parting
Decorative Luxury
Prose Painting
Declassification
Bookshop