The title of Anthony DelDonna’s book conveys the promise of subject matter whose time has surely come. Many must have wondered about the extent of production, performance, and reception of instrumental music on the Italian peninsula during the eighteenth century—in particular, its later decades, a period concerning which most eyes have traditionally been trained on Vienna. Naples, home to a number of famous music conservatories whose system of training has been examined to revelatory effect in recent scholarship, would seem to be an obvious point of focus. It is not as if Neapolitan music as a whole has been short of attention, but, DelDonna notes, that attention has been focused on the eighteenth-century operatic stage. The author’s aim is to broaden the perspective and, beyond that, to rehabilitate the reputation of the musical world that he depicts for us.
Naples, of course, could hardly be described as having been a...
University of California Press