The politics of princely entertainment: music and spectacle in the lives of Lorenzo Onofrio and Maria Mancini Colonna (1659-1689)

De Lucca, Valeria (2020) The politics of princely entertainment: music and spectacle in the lives of Lorenzo Onofrio and Maria Mancini Colonna (1659-1689) , Oxford. Oxford University Press, 400pp.

Abstract

The Politics of Princely Entertainment explores transformations in the politics of entertainment of the Italian aristocratic classes during the second half of the seventeenth century, a time when profound social and cultural shifts influenced the production and consumption of music. The emergence of commercial theaters in the 1630s in Venice and the great appeal that opera began to have for a large and international audience required the aristocracy to take on 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 had relied solely on patronage meant that singers, poets, and composers acquired unprecedented negotiating power. These questions are explored 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 examination here, 1659–1689, the Colonna were the most influential and active agents in Roman musical life: 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 the Prince and his wife through their travels to Venice, Spain (as Viceroys 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 faraway corners of Europe, serving diverse social and political purposes.

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