This study of the growth of instrumental music and the crucial transition of composers, from dependent court musicians to free professionals, emphasizes the major influential cultural trends and political events of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

"The History of Italian Opera" marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting its focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.
This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlouse offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera.

This study investigates the entire Italian operatic tradition, approaching opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theatre and as a complex social phenomenon. The text traces the social, economic and artistic history of the production of opera from its origins around 1600 to contemporary stagings. Although it has always been a deficit-producing enterprise, opera has maintained unchallenged pre-eminence in the culture of all Italians for centuries. The first half of the book explores the central role of theatre impresarios in putting on these complex productions and in increasing the output of librettos and scores. The second half considers the roles of the three key figures in the creation of any opera: the librettist, the composer and the singer.