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CACCINI,
Francesca, 1587-1640
La
liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina. Firenze 1625
Musica Drammatica, 4. Florence, 1998. 24
x 34 cm, viii, 131 pp. Line-cut of Florence, 1625 edition (full score).
Comic opera in four scences, credited as being the first Italian opera
performed outside of Italy. Wrappers. $50
"La
liberazione di Ruggiero fits into the Tuscan court’s long-term
pattern of representing powerful women. Its setting at Villa Imperiale,
its nearly all-female cast, and its plot focus on the contest between
two women over the sexual and political destiny of a young man all
invited its first audience to imagine they were being given a glimpse
of the gynecentric, feminizing world they feared.
| It invited them to confront and resolve
their anxieties about local women’s sexual and political power in an
entertaining way, by inviting them to suspend temporarily the boundary
separating representation and reality, in the very space most
associated with that power. It invited them, too, to a resolution in
which they could imagine themselves liberated from effeminacy (or from
unreasonable gynephobia) through the agency of an unnaturally powerful
but benevolent female, the sorceress Melissa". (Suzanne G. Cusick)
distributed by:
OMI - Old Manuscripts & Incunabula
PO Box 6019 FDR Station
New York NY 10150 tel 212/
758-1946 • fax 593-6186
www.omifacsimiles.com immels@earthlink.net |
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