Opera in Postwar Venice : Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde

Boyd-Bennett investigates the relationship of music and politics in the aftermath of war and dictatorship. Bringing locality into the study of twentieth-century music by focussing on the Italian and Venetian contexts, she shows how music culture was deeply imbedded in the most pressing social and cultural concerns of the post-war period.

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city''s nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.