Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera

Wendy Heller is the Scheide Professor of Music History and Chair of the Department of Music, Princeton University, USA. She specializes in the the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. Eleonora Stoppino is Associate Professor of Italian, Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, USA, where she directs the Program in Medieval Studies. She has published articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, the Italian epic tradition, and medieval conduct literature.

Part 1 Epic Theatricalities

1. Soundings of the lyre: Performing Homer in archaic Greece Deborah Steiner

2. "Like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song": Reading the Odyssey as Opera George A. Harne

3. Ariosto’s Ulysses: Medieval Homer and the Querelle de Femmes - Eleonora Stoppino

Part 2 Staging a Baroque Homer

4. La castità rinforzata: from Homer to Monteverdi Ellen Rosand

5. Drama, not Epic: Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Aesthetic Discourse in Subsequent Librettos Hendrik Schulze

6. Singing Love and Dancing War: The Ballo in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria - Michaela Baranello

7. Reimagining Ulysses: Spectacular Stage Effects in Contemporary Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria - Andrew Eggert

Part 3 Traditions and Afterlife

8. The Illiad and the Odyssey in the Epic Maggio of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines Jo Ann Cavallo

9. The Failure of Scarlatti’s Telemaco - Robert C. Ketterer

10. Intertextual Travel: Cantata as a Mode of Homeric Reception in Early 18th-Century France Michele Cabrini

11. Late Victorian Musical Odysseys. Scholarship, and Translation: The Curious Case of Samuel Butler Edith Hall

Epilogue

12. Ulysses’s Fantastic Voyage, from Dante to Wolcott Pietro Frassica