University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Translating, Adapting, And Performing Opera In Eighteenth- Century Cosmopolitan Europe: Lorenzo Da Ponte At The King's Theatre Lily Tamara Kass University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Music Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Kass, Lily Tamara, "Translating, Adapting, And Performing Opera In Eighteenth-Century Cosmopolitan Europe: Lorenzo Da Ponte At The King's Theatre" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2379. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2379 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2379 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Translating, Adapting, And Performing Opera In Eighteenth-Century Cosmopolitan Europe: Lorenzo Da Ponte At The King's Theatre Abstract This dissertation examines music and text circulation in cosmopolitan Europe during the last decades of the eighteenth century through the lens of translation. London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the largest center of Italian operatic performance outside of Italy. All performances sung at the King’s Theatre, London, were sung in Italian, the presumed language of opera, even when the works had been originated in other languages. This created the need for a culture of translation and adaptation of works from abroad, making them suitable for a London audience partially through the retention of foreignness and partially through domesticating practices. In the 1790s, a period of political tension between Britain and post-Revolution France, four French operas were presented at the King's Theatre in Italian translations attributed to the poet Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838): Gluck's Iphig�nie en Tauride, Gr�try's Z�mire et Azor, Monsigny's La belle Ars�ne, and Sacchini's Arvire et �v�lina.