Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- I Theoretical Issues
- II Emotional Repertoires
- III Music and Art
- 6 Music as Wonder and Delight: Construction of Gender in Early Modern Opera through Musical Representation and Arousal of Emotions
- 7 Politesse and Sprezzatura: The History of Emotions in the Art of Antoine Watteau
- IV Gender, Sexuality and the Body
- V Uses of Emotions
- Notes
- Index
6 - Music as Wonder and Delight: Construction of Gender in Early Modern Opera through Musical Representation and Arousal of Emotions
from III - Music and Art
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- I Theoretical Issues
- II Emotional Repertoires
- III Music and Art
- 6 Music as Wonder and Delight: Construction of Gender in Early Modern Opera through Musical Representation and Arousal of Emotions
- 7 Politesse and Sprezzatura: The History of Emotions in the Art of Antoine Watteau
- IV Gender, Sexuality and the Body
- V Uses of Emotions
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
It is generally acknowledged that music played a striking role in shaping emotions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contemporary theorists and composers continually referred to music in evaluating emotional responses in listeners and emphasizing their respective virtues and perils. Italian literary theorist Ludovico Antonio Muratori's critique of ‘effeminate’ music (Della perfetta poesia italiana, 1706) has frequently been quoted by scholars on this topic.
[I]t cannot be denied that our present theatre music has become unduly effeminate (effeminato), and thus more apt to corrupt the soul of those in the audience than to purge and improve them as did ancient music. This is the primary defect of modern operas, nor would it be necessary to go to great lengths to provide evidence of this assertion, were the matter not so pressing. We all know and feel what emotions are sparked within us when we listen to skilful musicians in the theatre. Their singing always inspires a certain softness and sweetness, which secretly contributes to further debasing the common people, turning them toward lowly vices, as they drink in the affected languor of the singing voices, and savour the vilest passions, seasoned with unwholesome melodies.
From the earliest operas of the late sixteenth century, music represented affects mimetically, just as it imitated the expression of human emotions for the audience through text and drama.
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- Information
- A History of Emotions, 1200–1800 , pp. 95 - 104Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014