About the editors: Marie-Claude Canova-Green is Reader in French at Goldsmiths’ College, London. She has published widely on court ballet and other large-scale public spectacles in 17th century France. Her publications include La politique-spectacle au Grand Siècle (Biblio 17, 1993) and Benserade: Ballets Pour Louis XIV (SLC/Klincksieck, 1997). Francesca Chiarelli took her PhD in music at Royal Halloway College, London. She has since focused on early Italian opera, notably on ‘parole per musica’ and the relationship between words and music. Her later work also includes studies of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte and Verdi’s Traviata.
2000 0-7734-7605-9 These essays focus on courtly musical entertainments in Early Modern Europe, providing a framework within which to locate the many aesthetic considerations which lay behind the creation of opera and other musical forms, and, through analyses of individual events, the modalities of the circulation and adaptation of a so-called Italian model throughout Europe. They highlight the constant evolution of the musical entertainments of the Baroque age, and in so doing invite us to reexamine clichés about the origin and nature of operatic genres. With illustrations.