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Opera as Ontology: Enlightened Music, Gender, and Genre Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson. Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Pp.345. $48.00.
Susan Vandiver Nicassio. Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Pp.336. $45.00.
John A. Rice. Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp.391. $85.00.
Downing A. Thomas. Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Pp.419. $85.00.
Throughout the eighteenth century, long by virtue of being especially eventful, the coming-of-age of musical aesthetics centered in part on the evolution and reformulation of opera, and, through the development of instrumental music, on the rise of the modern symphony. By late century, changes in performance practice were coupled with the role of gender in performance giving rise to professional standards of performance and the role of women as composers, librettists and arts patrons. Added to the ever-changing subject matter of opera itself during the century, these topics have retained the keen interest of musicologists and literary scholars to this day. Even as it continued to evolve as genre during the Enlightenment, opera retained its theorists, admirers, and detractors. Opera's ability to relate to the world as a combination of music and theater was questioned as early as 1677, when freethinker Charles de St. Évrémond asked how characters could musically present the most trivial aspects of their lives, commenting upon the ridiculous feat of 'singing while acting.' Mid-century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau lauds musical mimesis in his entry opera in le Dictionnaire de la musique, stating that it is the prodigious task of the musician to paint images that cannot be understood, wherein lies the complexity of his talent. In so doing, Rousseau states, he draws from the painter a vast number of tableaux stemming from nature itself through which to elicit sympathy from the spectator.
Each of the four books currently under review focuses on the gradual evolution of musical performance practice during the eighteenth century to engender attributes reflecting Enlightenment values of sympathy, humanity, justice, and social reform. Three of the four reflect the changing aesthetics of opera itself as the Enlightenment's quintessential...