1st Edition

Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera

Edited By Wendy Heller, Eleonora Stoppino Copyright 2019
222 Pages
by Routledge

222 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

222 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey , attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the... Read more


Part 1 Epic Theatricalities



1. Soundings of the lyre: Performing Homer in archaic Greece Deborah Steiner



2. "Like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song": Reading the Odyssey as Opera George A. Harne



3. Ariosto’s Ulysses: Medieval Homer and the Querelle de Femmes - Eleonora Stoppino



Part 2 Staging a Baroque Homer



4. La castità rinforzata: from Homer to Monteverdi Ellen Rosand



5. Drama, not Epic: Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Aesthetic Discourse in Subsequent Librettos Hendrik Schulze



6. Singing Love and Dancing War: The Ballo in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria - Michaela Baranello



7. Reimagining Ulysses: Spectacular Stage Effects in Contemporary Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria - Andrew Eggert



Part 3 Traditions and Afterlife



8. The Illiad and the Odyssey in the Epic Maggio of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines Jo Ann Cavallo



9. The Failure of Scarlatti’s Telemaco - Robert C. Ketterer



10. Intertextual Travel: Cantata as a Mode of Homeric Reception in Early 18th-Century France Michele Cabrini



11. Late Victorian Musical Odysseys. Scholarship, and Translation: The Curious Case of Samuel Butler Edith Hall



Epilogue



12. Ulysses’s Fantastic Voyage, from Dante to Wolcott Pietro Frassica



Biography

Wendy Heller is the Scheide Professor of Music History and Chair of the Department of Music, Princeton University, USA. She specializes in the the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition.



Eleonora Stoppino is Associate Professor of Italian, Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, USA, where she directs the Program in Medieval Studies. She has published articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, the Italian epic tradition, and medieval conduct literature.