Parole del metastasio : opera and emotions in 18th-century Europe

Abstract

What can Metastasio teach us today about human passions? At a time when reflection on the emotions has once again become a central concern in contemporary thought, his drammi per musica continue to display an extraordinary poetic and theatrical density: a form capable of articulating affects, conflicts, and moral dilemmas with precision, and of translating them into theatrical experience. At the heart of this volume lies the dramaturgy of the passions in opera seria during the long eighteenth century, and the way in which the “words of Metastasio” shape both the production of meaning and composers’ musical responses. The essays gathered here examine the librettos in their rhetorical, semantic, and theatrical dimensions, tracing the processes of adaptation, rewriting, and performative variation that accompanied their dissemination across Europe. What emerges is a multifaceted picture in which philology, performance history, and dramaturgical analysis converge to illuminate the conventions through which eighteenth-century opera codified—and rendered legible—emotions.