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Article: Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785.(France and French Cultural Areas)(Book Review)
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- June 1, 2004
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Music Library Association, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785. By Downing A. Thomas. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [vii, 411 p. ISBN 0-521-80188-5. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.
The development of French opera provided a flashpoint for the heated aesthetic debates in seventeenth-century France, most notably the "Querelle des Anciens et Modernes"--a series of literary arguments in which one side held up the forms and language of classical texts as unequalled exemplars, while the other argued that new genres and forms equaled, and even surpassed, those of ancient Greece and Rome. Opera, with ...