ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an image of how ideas about music and emotion were achieved in early eighteenth-century opera, with special reference to representations of gender and the idea of music as a means of expression independent from text and drama. The performative approach to music presented in this chapter has affinity with Reddy's theory of emotives. The aim of the chapter is to indicate how music is used as a means of expression independent of text and drama by representing and arousing emotions. From the earliest operas of the late sixteenth century, music represented affects mimetically, just as it imitated the expression of human emotions for the audience through text and drama. American musicologist Gary Tomlinson argues that late Renaissance opera was characterized by a musical representation of emotions that affected the listener through recognition of the imitated affects, whereas representation in early modern opera was based on musical conventions, not correspondences.
