MUS31380 Baroque Opera Tropes

Academic Year 2021/2022

Like many forms of popular entertainment, opera in seventeenth-century Venice was heavily reliant on formulae, not unlike those catalogued and analysed by the popular website TV Tropes. Indeed, the genre has been called the Hollywood blockbuster, soap opera, and Broadway musical of its day, as well as a spiritual successor to the commedia dell arte of the Renaissance. From the lamenting queen to the sworn virgin to the comic servant, the final love duet to the mad scene and the incantation sequence, librettists and composers had a vast array of stock characters, plots, and scenes on which to draw, and which they could recombine and vary almost endlessly. Marking the thirty-year publication anniversary of Ellen Rosand’s "Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre", this module considers the production and reception of stock roles and scenes in Venetian opera at different points throughout the seventeenth century, as well as their influence on music drama in other genres and countries. We will look at the theatricality of these conventions, the shared form and content of their text and music, and their development and dissemination, alongside implications for gender, sexuality, and politics. Drawing on critical theory, as well as reception studies, we will also discuss issues of narrative and dramatic convention more broadly, and the ways in which such conventions become codified, producing a ‘horizon of expectation’ through which artists can maximise audience engagement, either by fulfilling, thwarting, or over-fulfilling the audience’s predictions.