Winged feet and mute eloquence: dance in seventeenth-century Venetian opera

Abstract

This article shows how central dance was to the experience of opera in seventeenth-century Venice. The first part provides an introduction to the use of dance in Venetian opera and the primary sources – libretti, scores, treatises, and various eyewitness reports. The second section summarizes the extraordinary variety of subjects and style of the dances. A third section treats the musical sources, describing stylistic features of the dance music, as well as providing important insights as to how to identify which vocal or instrumental excerpts would likely have been danced.