6 - State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history

Summary

The complexity of opera is self-evident, but it also represents a great challenge. The genre's multi-media nature requires an interdisciplinary approach. Thus the richness of opera makes it an appropriate object of study for different research fields, disciplines, and methodologies. Often opera has been considered a matter for musicologists only (opera as a composer's work), or for literary studies (opera as a libretto: see the numerous works on Metastasio's texts that have appeared since 1982). More recently, opera has come to be recognized as a complex social phenomenon, and sociology aims to take the initiative in studying it.

Sociological approaches to opera could well produce very interesting results, just as musicological, literary, or historical approaches (see John Rosselli's studies on the nineteenth-century impresario) have already done. But though the object of study is the same (or is at least identified by the same term, “opera”), what these approaches aim to explain is totally different: for musicologists, opera as a work of art in its historical as well as cultural context; for sociologists, opera as a product and a means of expression of social relations. And though it is possible that sociologists, because they possess theories through which they can reinterpret the data of extant opera research, may find the results of musicological as well as literary or historical studies useful for their work, it seems less likely that sociological approaches to opera will help a musicologist find answers to his or her questions.