ABSTRACT
Adding to scholarly studies of madness in early opera (see Paolo Fabbri no. 352 on the origins of an operatic topos and Ellen Rosand no. 374 on operatic madness), Arias provides a valuable overview of madness in music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Madness is examined in relation to opera, monody, French opera, the English madsong, the later seventeenth-century cantata, the eighteenth-century serious opera, melodrama, comedy, instrumental music, and theory (music, philosophy, and medicine). In his discussion of madness in early Italian opera, including La finta pazza (1641; music by Francesco Sacrati) and Licori finta pazza innamorata d’Aminta (text offered to Monteverdi in the 1620s), Arias makes a distinction between mad scenes, which “employ boldly contrasting sections,” and laments, which maintain “a degree of musical unity” (p. 137).
