The Politics of Princely Entertainment

Book excerpt: ""The Politics of Princely Entertainment explores the transformations in the politics of entertainment of the Italian aristocratic classes during the second half of the seventeenth century, at a time in which profound social and cultural shifts influenced the production and consumption of music in radical ways. The emergence of commercial theaters in the 1630s in Venice and the great appeal that opera began to have on a large and international audience required the aristocracy to take up a new role within the complex network of agents responsible for the production not only of opera but of music in general. The increasing competition between commercial opera theaters, ruling courts, aristocratic families and religious institutions and the consequent professionalization of roles that previously relied solely on patronage meant that singers, poets and composers acquired unprecedented negotiating power. This books explores these questions following the journeys and ventures of two of the most prominent patrons in seventeenth-century Italy, Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife Maria Mancini. During the thirty years under exam, 1659-1689, the Colonna were the most influential and active agents in the musical life of Rome: they sponsored an unprecedented number of operas, serenatas, oratorios, public ceremonies and carnival parades while supporting the careers of the most prominent composers, librettists, musicians and singers of the time. Following Prince Colonna and his wife through their personal and institutional travels to Venice, Spain, as Viceroyalties of the Kingdom of Aragon, and later Naples, this book traces the journeys not only of scores and librettos, but also of the singers, composers and librettists whose art reached these far away corners of Europe, changing and transforming to serve diverse social and political purposes.""--