Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 07:58:53 +0200 (EET) From: Hannu Juhani Salmi <hansalmi@utu.fi> To: h-verkko@sara.cc.utu.fi Subject: Dissertation Abstracts in Music - 3
>
> Heller, Wendy
>
> Chastity, Heroism, and Allure:
> Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice
>
> Ph.D. Brandeis University, 1995
> (wheller@emerald.tufts.edu)
>
> In the context of contemporary writings by and about women, this
> dissertation examines the representation of the emblematic heroines
> of seventeenth century Venetian opera--Dido, Octavia, Veremonda,
> Semiramide and Messalin--as realized by Venice's most popular opera
> composers: Cavalli, Monteverdi, Pietro Ziani, and Carlo Pallavicino.
> The first section focuses on the writings about gender and sexuality
> that provide the essential background for the development of opera
> in Venice: philosophical and religious tracts, novelle, plays,
> catalogs of heroines, and behavior manuals, in which the authors
> invoked female exempla to argue about the nature of femininity.
> Chapter 1 examines the "exceptional woman" of legend and history,
> contemporary ideals concerning male and female virtue, biological
> sex and gender, and the special circumstances in Venice that allowed
> this polemic to flourish. The second chapter focuses on the writings
> of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a group of intellectual
> patricians deeply involved in the production of opera, who infused
> the developing genre with ambivalent attitudes towards women and
> sexuality. Opera, an ideal means for the dissemination of cultural
> messages, thus became a vital voice in the contemporary polemics
> about women.
>
> The remaining chapters form the catalog of heroines--variously
> chaste, heroic, and alluring--who brought to the stage complex
> historical legacies that profoundly influenced their operatic
> representations. Spanning a forty year period in which conventions
> become hardened, and in which academically minded librettists are
> replaced by market-oriented professionals, this section explores the
> musical and dramatic conventions by which composers and librettists
> transformed the women of legend and history into more acceptable
> models of feminine behavior, suppressing the rhetorical prowess of
> their most volatile and threatening heroines, and reserving musical
> eloquence for the lamenting, virtuous woman. The dissertation
> concludes by proposing that this conflict between the contemporary
> standards for female virtue and the rhetorical prowess of the opera
> heroine is manifest not only in the opera of seicento Venice, but is
> of fundamental concern to the genre as a whole, testifying to the
> perpetual danger and allure of a woman's voice.