Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage by Herbert Lindenberger

Lindenberger, Herbert. Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. x + 364. ISBN 0-8047-3104-7 (cloth).

Having already examined in Opera: the “Extravagant Art” (1984) the connections that opera establishes with its audiences through its unique conventions, Herbert Lindenberger now reminds us, with force and an engaging persuasiveness, that our response to the lyric theater depends upon a far larger framework-institutional, cultural, political–than that limited to the perceptions of affiliation between text and music. Although the book’s title suggests the author’s intention to contextualize the operatic experience within history, its richness resides, rather, in his animated, informative and insightful promenade across the evolution of opera’s theory and practice.