Abstract:This article interrogates why the creators of Napoleonic opera, specifically of Gaspare Spontini's Fernand Cortez (1809), were so eager to publicize their source-based method for representing history. The article frames this eagerness in broader developments toward historical realism in nineteenth-century France and its epistemological claims, namely, that history provides true knowledge about the past. These epistemological claims are foundational to how historians and artists sought to mobilize historicity a… Show more
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