"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers�

Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there de

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-cen

Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexual

'Dramma per musica', the most usual term for Italian serious opera from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, was a modern, enlightened form of theat