Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage

The first book to use subversive sexuality as a lens through which to provocatively view opera in the 21st century.

Imagine Armida, Handel’s Saracen sorceress, performing her breakneck coloraturas in a black figure—hugging rubber dress, beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane, suspending a captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her dungeon. Mozart’s peasant girl Zerlina, meanwhile, is tying up and blindfolding her fiancé to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don G...