Recognition in Mozart's Operas

Jessica Waldoff

Recognition in Mozart's Operas

Jessica Waldoff

Description

Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Though a standard feature of opera, recognition--a moment of new awareness that brings about a crucial reversal in the action--has been largely neglected in opera studies. In Recognition in Mozart's Operas, musicologist Jessica Waldoff draws on a broad base of critical thought on recognition from Aristotle to Terence Cave to explore the essential role it plays in Mozart's operas. The result is a fresh approach to the familiar question of opera as drama and a persuasive new reading of Mozart's operas.

Recognition in Mozart's Operas

Jessica Waldoff

Author Information

Jessica Waldoff is an Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Recognition in Mozart's Operas

Jessica Waldoff

Reviews and Awards

"Jessica Waldoff provides a scholarly and illuminating discussion, handsomely produced with generous musical illustrations, developing new themes of critical thought, and stimulating fresh insight into Morzart's operas."--Andrew Steptoe, Music and Letters

"Jessica Waldoff's book is an original, well-written, and important contribution to the study of Mozart's operas."--John Platoff, Professor of Music, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

"Professor Waldoff's study of recognition in Mozart's operas joins a select body of scholarship devoted to the thematics of this great corpus. But it is also much more than that. Her broad-ranging approach reaches back to the Aristotelian roots of recognition as a dramatic trope, and forward to its role in the music dramas of Wagner and Verdi. Professor Waldoff also restores 'plot' in opera studies to the station it deserves as a cardinal artistic ingredient and redresses, clear-sightedly and without polemics, the imbalance of 'text' and 'score' that has haunted much musicological writing about opera and drama."--Thomas Bauman, Professor of Musicology, Northwestern University

"Jessica Waldoff's analysis of the specifically musical representation of recognition not only delivers new and fruitful ways of understanding the operas she discusses, but also reopens the whole question of what happens at these strange but crucial moments in a story."--Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French, University of Oxford, Emeritus Research Fellow, St. John's College, and author of Recognitions: A Study in Poetics