Osmin's Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text - Softcover

Kivy, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801485894 ISBN 13: 9780801485893

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1999

Synopsis

In his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical―as opposed to a dramatic―necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's Idomeneo is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners are attuned to its seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears.

About this title

Review:

"Kivy is simply the best philosopher writing about music today.... Here he studies the special problem of opera, how it became both a dramatic and a musical art, and what its underlying aesthetic principles are. He traces opera's philosophical foundations from the imitation theories of Plato and Aristotle, to the representation theory of the Italian Camerata, the mechanistic psychology of Descartes, the doctrine of affektenlehre, and the associationist psychology of the British Enlightenment.... Kivy's writing is honest, insightful, careful, and witty.... There is meat here for philosophers, musicians, music theorists, historians, and social critics."

Source: Choice

"Kivy provides close philosophical analysis of texts that underpin the origins of Western European opera and... relates seventeenth and eighteenth-century operatic practice to the philosophical and psychological theories of the times.... In a long and generally excellent discussion Kivy takes as his target those writers... who attempt to deduce a composer's psycho-biography from other librettos he chooses to set.... Kivy's book has a certain acumen and charm."

Source: Times Literary Supplement

Synopsis:

In this work, the author studies the special problem of opera - how it became both a dramatic and a musical art, and what its underlying aesthetic principles are. He traces its philosophical foundations from the imitation theories of Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and the British Enlightenment. In a new concluding chapter, the author advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical - as opposed to a dramatic - necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's "Idomeneo" is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners are attuned to its 17th- and 18th-century forebears.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0801485894
• ISBN 13: 9780801485893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336