This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart’s late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book’s thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera’s advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart’s operatic work.

The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning -- through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks publish selected papers drawn from the various advanced-level activities at the University of Chicago Center in Paris. In Volume Seven, scholars from across the continent consider Europe as a discourse made of the sediments of historical experience and utopian ideas. Attached to a geographical region with constantly shifting boundaries, the group considers EUtROPEs as the cultural codes that endow Europe with the many meanings that it has held for different actors at different times. Twenty historians, linguists, cultural scientists, musicologists, and scholars of philosophy, urban studies, and film studies who came together at the University of Chicago's Center in Paris discuss these tropes in different fields and consider whether the present can continue to bear the weight of the many ideas and legacies of Europe.

Topics are musical signs developed and employed primarily during the long eighteenth century. Their significance relies on associations that are clearly recognizable to the listener with different genres, styles and types of music making. Topic theory, which is used to explain conventional subjects of musical composition in this period, is grounded in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism, while drawing also from music cognition and semiotics. The concept of topics was introduced into by Leonard Ratner in the 1980s to account for cross-references between eighteenth-century styles and genres. As the invention of a twentieth-century academic, topic theory as a field is comparatively new, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory provides a much-needed reconstruction of the field's aesthetic underpinnings. The volume grounds the concept of topics in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism. Documenting the historical reality of individual topics on the basis of eighteenth-century sources, it traces the origins of topical mixtures to transformations of eighteenth-century musical life, and relates topical analysis to other methods of music analysis conducted from the perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners. Focusing its scope on eighteenth-century musical repertoire, The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory lays the foundation for further investigation of topics in music of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

This 15 volume, second edition features revised and new articles. Among the 12,000 entries in the encyclopedia are articles on theology, philosophy, history, literary figures, saints, musicians and much more.

This book charts the musical, cultural, and social contexts of Mozart's collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, illuminating these great masterpieces along with Mozart's creative process and the functions of 18th-century opera.