Textbooks and program notes summarize the relationship between story and music in opera seria with tidy bullet points: recitatives = action; arias = reflection; ensembles sometimes contribute to a story’s progression, while instrumental pieces typically do not. Nathan Link’s A Poetics of Handel’s Operas dismisses such generalizations as caricatures, going so far as to assert that opera seria is “easily among the most complex forms of storytelling yet devised” (p. 7). The author turns to narratological theory, with occasional forays into opera studies and cinema studies (including film music scholarship), to explain the “semantic decoding” (p. 2) that audiences must master to make sense of these drammi per musica.
Link positions his approach as divergent from both traditional Handel scholarship and musical narratology. His literature review portrays the former as focused on source and borrowing studies, political and cultural concerns, singers, and minor subtopics. Link aims to fill a gap:...
University of California Press