Ralph P. Locke provides fresh insights into Western culture's increasing awareness of ethnic Otherness during the years 1500-1800.

A compelling new study of instrumental music in early modern Naples and of the string virtuosi who disseminated it through Europe.

The success of Orlando furioso in Italian musical theatre is vast and complex. This book examines the main phases of the circulation and influence of Orlando furioso on the seventeenth-century music scene by reconstructing an overall historical and critical profile, but also through the recovery and philologically verified transcription of about forty dramatic texts derived from Ariosto's main narrative currents.

From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.