The Concept of Opera

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 investigates opera’s concept historically, given a context in which the terms of the individual arts—music, painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, dance, or ballet—have been contested, often by contests being staged within the artworks themselves. This context is best described as agonisticand paragonal. Connecting opera’s concept to the ancient Greek notion of agôn—contest/debate—and to the Renaissance idea of the paragone—comparison/contest—opens up a two-fold path. It leads the concept, via a “fatherly” hand, to its claimed origins in Classical Athens and, via a “maternal” hand, to its claimed birth in Italy. The ancestral discourse of origin and birth begs for serious deconstruction. Yet, its impact on opera’s history is pervasive and undeniable. This chapter thus investigates the discourse critically, to reveal its use and its abuse in the many histories written—pro and contra opera as an art.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.