Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

4-1-2024

Publication Title

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Volume

77

Issue

1

First page number:

247

Last page number:

250

Abstract

Textbooks and program notes summarize the relationship between story and music in opera seria with tidy bullet points: recitatives = action; arias = reflection; ensembles sometimes contribute to a story’s progression, while instrumental pieces typically do not. Nathan Link’s A Poetics of Handel’s Operas dismisses such generalizations as caricatures, going so far as to assert that opera seria is “easily among the most complex forms of storytelling yet devised” (p. 7). The author turns to narratological theory, with occasional forays into opera studies and cinema studies (including film music scholarship), to explain the “semantic decoding” (p. 2) that audiences must master to make sense of these drammi per musica.

Controlled Subject

Operas; Storytelling; Narrative (Rhetoric); Criticism and interpretation; Handel, George Frideric, 1685-1759

Disciplines

Composition | Music Performance | Music Theory

File Format

pdf

File Size

107.9 KB

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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