Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform

How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should say — or how?

French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences.

Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, exam...