Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution

Pierpaolo Polzonetti is Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His first book on Giuseppe Tartini was awarded the International Prize for Musical Studies by the Petrassi Institute of Latina. His article on Mozart's Così fan tutte received the Einstein Award conferred by the American Musicological Society. Several of his scholarly articles on opera have appeared in Opera Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Music, Study Verdani and the Cambridge Opera Journal. He is the co-editor, with Anthony R. DelDonna, of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera.

• Introduction; 1. The changing world of the moon; 2. Worlds up and upside down; 3. Montezuma and the exotic Europeans; 4. Cecchina goes to America; 5. A Californian goes to Europe; 6. Americans in the storm; 7. The good Quaker and his slaves; 8. Quakers with guns; Epilogue: Figaro's transatlantic crossings.

'… a highly original study that explores, with extraordinary flair and engaging prose, views of America and Americans in eighteenth-century Italian opera, venturing into repertories unfamiliar to most opera specialists and offering a fresh perspective on European cultural reception of American social and political identity. The author demonstrates an erudite command of musical, literary, political and social texts, revealing, through a broadly contextual approach, not only how Revolutionary America was perceived by European opera audiences, but how a little-studied repertory influenced dramatic innovations in the opera buffa repertory of the era's major composers.' Lewis Lockwood Award committee, American Musicological Society