Lo scherno degli dei : myth and derision in the dramma per musica of the seventeenth century / Jean-François Lattarico -- Helpings from the great banquets of epic : Handel's Teseo, and Arianna in Creta / Robert C. Ketterer -- Envoicing the divine : oracles in lyric and spoken drama in seventeenth-century France / Geoffrey Burgess -- Addressing the divine : the 'numinous' accompagnato in opera seria / Bruno Forment -- Iphigenia's curious Ménange à trois in myth, drama, and opera / Reinhard Strohm -- Spectatorship and involvement in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride / Bram van Oostveldt.

HKBU library

YT2025 M08

Throughout the Ancien Régime, mythology played a vital role in opera, defining such epoch-making works as Claudio Monteverdi's 'La favola d'Orfeo' (1607) and Christoph Gluck's 'Iphigénie en Tauride' (1779). The operatic presence of the Greco-Roman gods and heroes was anything but unambiguous or unproblematic, however. This book highlights myth's chameleonic life in the Italian 'dramma per musica' and French 'tragédie en musique' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.