Perspectives on Opera and the Operatic
In the four hundred years since its invention in Renaissance Florence, opera has become synonymous with the grandiose, the excessive, and the melodramatic, yet it has only gained a foothold in the academy as an object of serious academic study within the past fifty years. Since then, however, an abundance of scholarship has yielded everything from formal musicological readings of operatic works to theoretical inquiries inspired by psychoanalysis into voice and performance. And topics like the relationship between opera and sovereignty in seventeenth century Italy and the appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich underscore how opera has never been far from the political sphere in the Western world.