Production, consumption and political function of seventeenth-century opera

Abstract

This article was first planned in 1976. It owes its existence to Pierluigi Petrobelli who, charged with organising a round table on seventeenth-century music drama for the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society, Berkeley 1977, invited the authors to prepare a paper as a focus for discussion and offered them constant encouragement throughout its preparatory stages. It is our pleasant duty to mention that during the time of preparation of the paper Lorenzo Bianconi held scholarships from the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani and the Istituto Storico Germanico of Rome.

Accounting and music: The role of Giuseppe Verdi in shaping the nineteenth-century culture industry

“…Music becomes a cultural product when included within a wider project (representation) and directed at the public, for whom it performs an aesthetic or expressive function (DiMaggio, 1987;Hirsch, 1972). The performances of famous operas, such as those of Verdi, Wagner, Rossini and Donizetti, were intended, throughout the nineteenth century, as a form of entertainment aimed at creating an opportunity for social interaction for the aristocracy and the urban upper middle class and at emphasizing their social status (Bianconi and Walker, 1984;Bourdieu, 1984;DiMaggio, 1982). Musical performance is considered a tool to build and maintain a social status: the more an artist is preferred by the less cultivated, the more the same artist is rejected by the more cultivated (Smith and Jacobs, 2011).…”

La dramaturgia musical en el litoral. Una propuesta de estudio internacional

“…4 Fundamentalmente The Opera Industry In Italy From Cimarosa To Verdi: The Role Of The Impresario, (1984) y Singers Of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (1992). 5 Bianconi, L. y Walker, T. (1984). 6 El grupo es coordinado por el Istituto per lo Studio della Musica Latinoamericana, fue formado en 1992 y su chair es Aníbal Cetrangolo.…”

Italian-Style Opera Houses: A Historical Review

“…On the other hand, these typologies of theatres could justify by hosting enough paying spectators the affordability of new developments/constructions for the opera manager. The role of the 17th-Century Venetian managers in reviewing the acoustics of opera should be acknowledged [12]: thanks to commercial documents is possible to know, today, all the details about orchestras, audience, representations [13,14].…”