| Summary: | This study offers a critical assessment of musical drama based on the <i>Orlando</i><i> furioso</i> of Ludovico Ariosto from the beginning of the genre to the end of the seventeenth century, and supplies a companion volume containing transcriptions of nearly all of the relevant poetic texts. The Introduction provides an outline of the history of the <i>Orlando furioso</i> in music in the madrigal through 1632, an assessment of monody and the Camérata, a survey of Seicento Ariosto reception studies, a reflection on modern Italianist scholarship and music, the main elements of the publication history of the <i>Orlando furioso</i> in the Seicento, remarks on the influence of the pastoral drama in the period, a consideration of the literary critical reception of the poem in Seicento commentaries, the method by which texts inspired by the <i>Orlando furioso</i> were identified and selected, and a detailed presentation of the three historical periods around which the central chapters of the thesis are organised. The introduction ends by summarising the central thrust of the thesis, namely that poetry deriving from the <i>Orlando furioso</i> plays a more significant role in the history of Seicento musical drama than previously suggested, and that important differences among the texts of Ariosto-inspired musical dramas in point of narrative structure, visual poetics, language and style (especially meter and syntax) invite a three-part reading of Ariostean musical drama in the period of 1600-1699. Chapter II presents a reading of the exciting variety of Ariostean musical-dramatic texts (libretti and manuscripts) in the early period (1609-1699) and links narrative reform and the emergence of the <i>aria da capo</i> in the period to a prevailing Arcadian poetics of clarity and an increasing demand for tuneful <i>diletto</i>. The Conclusion suggests this new history of Ariosto in musical drama has significant implications for future Tasso musical reception studies.
|
|---|
