Kivy, P: Osmin's Rage Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text

In his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical -- as opposed to a dramatic -- necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's Idomeneo is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners axe attuned to its seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears.