Recognition in Mozart’s Operas
Researched Bibliographic Dossier
Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.
- Title
- Recognition in Mozart’s Operas
- Author
- Jessica Waldoff
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Place
- New York / Oxford
- Year
- 2006
- Extent
- 352 pages (print edition)
- ISBN
- 9780195151978
- Online ISBN
- 9780199870387
- Language
- English
- Type
- Analytical monograph / Mozart opera studies
SCOPE & CONTENT
Waldoff builds the book around recognition — the movement from ignorance to knowledge associated with Aristotle’s anagnorisis — and asks how this dramatic mechanism operates specifically in Mozart’s theatre. Literary theory and musical analysis are combined to study moments when identity, feeling, motive or moral truth becomes newly understood. The argument reaches beyond plot mechanics: recognition becomes a way of examining Enlightenment ideas of knowledge, sensibility, forgiveness, constancy and social reconciliation, and of explaining why certain endings in Mozart feel both theatrically inevitable and ethically complicated.
RESEARCH VALUE
The analytical core includes Die Zauberflöte, La finta giardiniera, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito, with further discussion of Figaro, Idomeneo and Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Particularly useful is the distinction between successful, deferred and denied recognition: Don Giovanni, for example, can be read through what characters refuse or fail to know, while Così fan tutte tests sensibility and self-knowledge. The monograph is valuable for readers interested in the junction of musical form, dramatic action, eighteenth-century ethics and theories of narrative ending.
- Catalogue completeness
- 8 / 10 core bibliographic fields