A01=Peter Morgan Barnes
adaptation
Author_Peter Morgan Barnes
Category=AVLA
Category=AVLF
Category=AVM
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Henry Bishop
literacy
musicology
neoclassicism
orality
Pasticcio opera
romanticism
William Davenant
Product details
- ISBN 9781526195494
- Weight: 576g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera. This radical way of creating opera formed a counterweight, even a relief, to the trenchant masculinity of literate culture in the seventeenth century. It undermined the narrowing of nationalism in the eighteenth century, and was an act of gross sacrilege against the cult of Romantic genius in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it found itself on the wrong side of copyright law. However, in the twenty-first century it is enjoying a tentative revival. This book redefines pasticcio as a method rather than a genre of opera and aligns it with other art forms which also created their works from pre-existing parts, including sculpture. A pasticcio opera is created from pre-existing music and text, thus flying in face of insistence on originality and creation by a solo genius.
Peter Morgan Barnes is a research fellow in opera at the University of Bristol and currently a heritage researcher at Swansea University
