Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

1bis thesis explores operatic production in Venice's nascent postwar culture (1951- 1961). Although long sidelined as a site of political authority, Venice took on new life in the twentieth century, both as a hub of avant-garde activity and as a site of cultural recuperation. I begin with the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), an opera that provoked anxieties over memory and cultural heritage in a society trying to efface the past and em brace future-orientated mass media. Echoes of the past in the postwar period reverberate in the second chapter, which is on the revival of Verdi's Attila (1951). The performance became a focal part of contemporary concerns with posterity: an exhumed classic, a vehicle for rewriting Risorgimento history and a media event. The third chapter focuses on the premiere of three one-act music theatre pieces, commissioned by the 1959 music festival to alleviate widespread calls of opera crisis. Critics perceived the resultant works to be grounded in ideas of openness, diversity and eclecticism-a proto-neoavanguardia distinct from resurgent high modernism. The final chapter takes as its topic the premiere of Luigi Nona's lntolleranza 1960 (1961). Heralded by some as opera's salvation, Intolleranza was premised on a noisy realism that served not just as a locus of political memory, but also as a regeneration of older artistic forms in response to the increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. In sketching these four case studies, I construct a specific picture of opera at midcentury, one forged in the aftermath of war and in response to cultural and technological changes unforeseen in the Fascist period. I want to suggest, furthermore, a fleeting revitalisation of operatic culture, one filtered through a lugubrious rhetoric born of crisis, museography and dangerously beguiling mass media.

From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.

Feasting and Fasting in Operashows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage. In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.

Music and Democracy explores music as a resource for societal transformation processes. This book provides recent insights into how individuals and groups used and still use music to achieve social, cultural, and political participation and bring about social change. The contributors present outstanding perspectives on the topic: From the promise and myth of democratization through music technology to the use of music in imposing authoritarian, neoliberal or even fascist political ideas in the past and present up to music's impact on political systems, governmental representation, and socio-political realities. The volume further features approaches in the fields of gender, migration, disability, and digitalization.

The first major study of Saint-Saëns's stage music, timed to coincide with revivals of his operas on stage.

In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.