Eighteenth-Century Opera and the Mimetic Affektenlehre
Eighteenth-Century Opera and the Mimetic Affektenlehre
This chapter opens in the late seventeenth century, describing the stabilization of musical conventions that took place in the opera theatre. It examines the aesthetics of early serious opera—an often-tragic spectacle that united poetry with stage action and music to create an integrated series of mimetic representations for its audiences. Music’s affective power was clearly felt in this medium, though theorists around the turn of the century could only approximate its method of operation. Their efforts formed the mimetic Affektenlehre: a set of taxonomic music theory documents that attempted to codify the technical basis of opera’s multimedia representations in musical terms. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how theorists quickly realized that their efforts could never fully capture this system, nor would their account of it ever completely agree.
Keywords: affect, Lully, mimesis, mimetic Affektenlehre, opera, Rameau, representation, Rousseau
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