ABSTRACT

Dent’s identification of an “operatic principle”—one that, he explains, “is neither the normal musical principle nor the normal dramatic principle”—is fundamental to the expository and interpretive thrust of his argument. Whereas literary and musicological scholarship have tended, in the modern era, to maintain their own distinct methodologies and objects of study, opera by its very nature has always demanded an interdisciplinary approach that is committed not just to the surmounting of conventional analytical categories and bodies of knowledge, but to a rigorous conceptual flexibility as well. This Dent achieves by opening up his definition of the “operatic” to encompass a wide variety of works whose deployment of music in a dramatic context ranges from the scrupulous “throughcomposition” with which the form has commonly been associated ever since the

1 Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England During the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), vii. As Dent explains (p. ix), the book was “ready for press in 1915,” but nonetheless benefited from further revisions in the dozen years that followed.