Art and Ideology in European Opera

Essays highlight the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries. Three broad themes are opened up from a variety of approaches: nationalism, cosmopolitanism and national opera; opera, class and the politics of enlightenment; and opera and otherness. Opera, that most extravagant of the performing arts, is infused with the contexts of power-brokering and cultural display in which it was conceived and experienced. For individual operas such contexts have shifted over time and