Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Voices
- Part II Ears
- Part III Technologies
- 8 Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
- 9 Technological Phantoms of the Opéra
- 10 Circuit Listening
- Part IV Bodies
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
from Part III - Technologies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2019
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Voices
- Part II Ears
- Part III Technologies
- 8 Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera
- 9 Technological Phantoms of the Opéra
- 10 Circuit Listening
- Part IV Bodies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination , pp. 175 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019