ABOUT THIS BOOK

Feasting and Fasting in Opera shows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage.

In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships.

Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Pierpaolo Polzonetti is the Jan and Beta Popper Professor of Music at University of California, Davis. He is the author of Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, which won the American Musicological Society’s Lockwood Book Award. He is coeditor, with Anthony R. DelDonna, of the Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera.

REVIEWS

“Polzonetti cleverly weaves together the history of opera with a beloved culture of delicious Italian food, and then some!”

— Francesca Zambello, Artistic and General Director of The Glimmerglass Festival and Artistic Director of the Washington National Opera

“Opera and feasting go splendidly together: we want to combine an evening at the opera with a good dinner, even if we are no longer allowed, as we once were, to take our refreshments during a performance. Even so, no one until now has explored the proximity of opera and food in such depth and with such illuminating insights as Pierpaolo Polzonetti. This is the book to turn to if you want to understand that we owe the birth of opera not only to the learned disputations in Renaissance academies, but also to the elaborate multi-media banqueting practices of the period. Polzonetti is attuned to the significance of what and how the audiences ate during performances until the practice was eliminated during the nineteenth century, victim of middle-class propriety. He is just as attuned to the significance of what and how was consumed by the protagonists of Italianate opera from Monteverdi through Mozart, to Verdi and Puccini. This book offers a feast as delicious as it is nutritious, but be forewarned: reading it will make you hungry.”

— Karol Berger, Stanford University

“Who knew that food and opera are, and have always been, intimately connected? With his humanistic learning, linguistic virtuosity, and trademark tasty wit, Polzonetti takes us from classical texts to cannibalism and on to Callas. Historical recipes are a bonus for readers interested in a more multi-modal experience of Polzonetti’s brilliant work.”

— Mary Hunter, Bowdoin College

“Food and the opera have certainly always gone together—before, during, and after the show. Today, eating at the opera is no longer considered respectful, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those restrictions are lifted in the near future. Theatergoers would be jealous of the spreads that are backstage in the dressing room areas, and even the little snacks that some performers hide in their costumes in case of an emergency. I just love this book. It’s making me hungry!”

— Nathan Gunn, co-director, Lyric Theatre at Illinois

"Producers of modern entertainments should find useful information about alternative uses of food and drinks, especially if they are considering re-introducing feasting into operatic performances. Thus, this book is for researchers in this field and for opera-buffs."

— Pennsylvania Literary Journal

”Polzonetti allows himself some nostalgia for the world we have lost, including the experience of eating at the opera, and speculates that operagoers of the past may have possessed ‘a better economy of attention’, which ‘did not include pretending to be engaged when they were not ‘."

— Times Literary Supplement

"The meat of the book is the role of food and drink in an opera’s narrative and music."

— UC Davis College of Letters and Science

"Brilliant. . . [Polzonetti] demonstrates in delectable prose that food and drink–including how and when they are consumed, and situations in which an individual refrains from eating or refuses to dine with another—are central to a major Western cultural institution: opera."

— The Arts Fuse

"Feasting and Fasting in Opera is a highly singular book, which is to be expected given that gastromusicology—itself a highly singular term—is associated with one person and one person alone. Pierpaolo Polzonetti has set out to explore how convivial pleasures animated life on both sides of the boundary separating the stage from the world, a boundary that, as he demonstrates, was far more porous before Wagner tacked a 'no food or drink' sign to the door at Bayreuth and locked us all in the dark."

— Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Feasting and Fasting in Opera constitutes a novel and welcome link of musicology and food studies. . . Further, it reminds readers how gastronomic pleasures were once blended with the opera going experience, an infusion we might do well to reinstate."

— Gastronomica

"From Don Giovanni’s final supper and fall into hell (watched by a horrified audience simultaneously subsumed with their own meal) to Verdi’s multiple operatic gastronomic characters (whom numerous Italian audience members could identify both in their society and amongst themselves), this book is a feast in and of itself for those readers who indulge in its multiplicity of operatic cuisine, desserts, and exceptional cocktails."

— Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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