Laura Vasilyeva: Opera and the Built Environment, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

"In the nineteenth century alone, thousands of architectural spaces were built around the world in the style known as teatro all'italiana. These venues were built to accommodate a host of entertainments, but one above all else: opera. In Opera and the Built Environment, Laura Vasilyeva guides us to a deeper understanding of opera by embracing the material conditions within which sound is created. Beginning from the premise that we cannot adequately contemplate or comprehend opera detached from its architectural settings, Opera and the Built Environment offers an account of opera that is informed by architecture and the built environments in which operas were heard during the genre's heyday in the nineteenth century and beyond. Orienting us to theater's architectural elements-their surfaces, their atmosphere, their acoustics, their thresholds-as experiential categories, Vasilyeva shows how opera houses induce a sense of aesthetic wonder and sensuous pleasure continuous with the dramas that unfolds within them. In Vasilyeva's analysis, at a fundamental level opera and the built environment in which we experience it cannot be separated. In other words, when we listen to opera we also listen to the entwined histories of music and architecture. Connecting the dots between when and where construction materials are excavated, to how the theaters are constructed and then utilized, to the environmental toll of their continual emissions, Opera and the Built Environment shows us new and unexpected patterns in how opera connects to the world we know"--