Publisher's Synopsis
The intensive effort, toward the end of the sixteenth century, to animate dramatic texts through the use of music created a strain to define the unique properties of words and music and the optimum formula for wedding the two. More than the other musical expressions of the time, opera is the quintessence of this search. In the struggle to tell a story and to identify that which is uniquely musical in the telling, the institution of opera may be thought of as the embodiment of a statement about the nature and power of music. Aesthetic theory and early experiments on the powers of music have an analogue in the gropings toward the institutionalization of science in the same period. Both give expression to the new assertion of Will operating on the world and both attempt to define its nature. From the author's Introduction.
