A Sociable Moment

Opera and Festive Culture in Baroque Siena

Colleen Reardon (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

320 Seiten

2016
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-049630-2 (ISBN)

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A Sociable Moment is the first book to examine the rise of opera in Siena during the Baroque. It focuses both on opera as a manifestation of civic self-fashioning and sociability, especially in pastoral works promoted by the expatriate Chigi family, and opera as business under the impresario Girolamo Gigli.

After their military defeat by the Florentines in the mid-sixteenth century, the citizens of Siena turned from politics to celebratory, social occasions to express their civic identity and show their capacity for collective action. In the first major work of its kind, Colleen Reardon opens a window on the ways in which the Sienese absorbed the new genre of opera into their own festive apparatus and challenges the prevailing view that operatic productions in the city were merely an extension of Medici power to the provinces. It was, rather, members of the expatriate Chigi family who exploited the festive impulse of their countrymen, coordinating operatic performances with their triumphant visits home by activating ties of friendship and family as well as connections to Sienese institutions, most notably the Assicurate, possibly the first all-female academy in Italy. If the Chigi proved successful at inserting opera into larger patterns of sociability that conveyed the very essence of what it meant to be Sienese (senesità), their successor, the flamboyant playwright and librettist Girolamo Gigli, struggled in his attempts to transform operatic performances into professional enterprises. Fluidly written and richly embellished with anecdotes from historical chronicles, A Sociable Moment offers insight into the Sienese experience with opera during the genre's rapid expansion throughout the Italian peninsula during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Colleen Reardon is a Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She is a devoted topo d'archivio (archive rat) whose research centers on musical culture in early modern Siena. She enjoys teaching music history classes of all stripes, including specialized courses on Jane Austen and Music, Film Music, and the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim. When not teaching or doing research, she can be found devouring mystery novels.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Curtain Rises
Chapter 2: A Festive Culture and its Sociable Network
Chapter 3: The Chigi between Rome and Siena
Chapter 4: A Princess Comes to Town
Chapter 5: Siena, the Chigi, and the Pastoral
Documents
Chapter 6: Pastoral Reflections, Political Drama, and the End of an Era
Chapter 7: The Rozzi and Opera in the 1690s
Documents
Chapter 8: Innocence Recognized and Cammilla Revived
Documents
Chapter 9: Gigli's Last Bow and the Return of the Pastoral
Documents
Appendix: Chronology of Opera in Siena, 1669-1704
Bibliography

Erscheinungsdatum	25.05.2016
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	236 x 157 mm
Gewicht	544 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-19-049630-4 / 0190496304
ISBN-13	978-0-19-049630-2 / 9780190496302
Zustand	Neuware