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In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early
opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell'arte. Along the way,
she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of
the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more
than fifty years later. Wilbourne considers a series of case
studies structured around the most important and widely explored
operas of the period: Monteverdi's lost L'Arianna, as well as his
Il Ritorno d'Ulisse and L'incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and
Marazzoli's L'Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli's
L'Ormindo and L'Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the
sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell'arte theater
specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play produced an
audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather
than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne
suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and
facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater. Highlighting
productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and
venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how
the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success
of opera as a genre.
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