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A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.
WINNER: 2025 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award (Mozart Society of America)
Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy 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 book 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."
Sommario
Exhibition List
Patrons of the Museum
Guidebook A Mozartean Museum
The Death of Tragedy
Exhibiting Enlightenment
Dramma per musicaMap of the Exhibits
Entrance Hall Arts, Letters, and Music
Modern Antiquarian Spaces
"La Poésie" and its Systems
Arts and Letters
The Lyrical Impulse
Exhibit A The Poet's Prose: Mitridate Room 1 Literary Adventures in Télémacomania
Treasonous Popularity
Sensual Lyricism
Tragic Prose on Trial
Opera as Mediator
Room 2
Mitridate's Operatic Poetry
Allegorical Mithridates
Political Mithridates
Operatic Mithridates
Transformative Farnace
Exhibit B Paintings Unseen: Idomeneo Room 3 Imagi(ni)ng the Prose Epic
Epic Values
Painting
TélémaqueMyths Invisible and Unheard
Epic Opera
Room 4
Idomeneo's Operatic Canvas
The Operatic Stage as Canvas
The Composition of an Opera
Portrait of a King
Supernatural Angles
Exit Regrets on Parting
Decorative Luxury
Prose Painting
Declassification
Bookshop
Info autore
KATHARINA CLAUSIUS is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and World Languages, Université de Montréal, Canada.
Riassunto
A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.
