Opera And The Politics Of Tragedy

"This book plays host to an Enlightenment exhibition. On display: a curated collection of operas, paintings, and literary works that were all complicit in a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. A Mozartian Museum captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called "Telemacomania" crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this museum showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern.""--