Throughout the Ancien Régime, mythology played a vital role in opera, defining such epoch-making works as Claudio Monteverdi's 'La favola d'Orfeo' (1607) and Christoph Gluck's 'Iphigénie en Tauride' (1779). The operatic presence of the Greco-Roman gods and heroes was anything but unambiguous or unproblematic, however. This book highlights myth's chameleonic life in the Italian 'dramma per musica' and French 'tragédie en musique' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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