INTERMISSION PLAYS

Chapter:

CHAPTER 8 The Comic Style

Source:

MUSIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

During opera’s first century, especially at the public theaters of Venice (and as we have known since chapter 1), it was considered good form to mix serious and comic scenes and characters, producing a kind of heterogeneous “Shakespearean” drama that afforded audiences the very utmost in varied entertainment. Then the reformers got to work. Seeking to restore the dignity of the earliest “neoclassical” (courtly) operas and justify the genre in light of classical poetic theory, librettists began to regard comic scenes as breaches of taste. Such scenes were banished, at first by the high-minded dilettantes who ran the learned academies, finally by the frosty Metastasio.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 8 The Comic Style." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2024. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-08007.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 8 The Comic Style. In Oxford University Press, Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries. New York, USA. Retrieved 8 Dec. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-08007.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 8 The Comic Style." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 8 Dec. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-08007.xml