Publisher's Synopsis
This original and entertaining sociological study takes a comprehensive and critical view of opera: as unique cultural artefact, as loss-making ?industry?, as institution with a ?museum? culture, and as consumed commodity of rare distinction and elaborate ritual. - - Specific chapters deal with opera within the contexts of musicological analysis, auratic art and fetishised taste; opera as business and as ?museum?; and the opera of singers, producers and audiences. There is also a chapter on 'opera': popular, commercialised fragments of opera outside the opera house, consumed by and through all manner of reproduced means ? CD, video, Three Tenors concerts, film and TV soundtracks, advertising jingles etc. - - Despite the supposed popularisation of 'opera' during the past decade or so, this study concludes that it remains an art-form, institution and ritual of relative inaccessibility and exclusivity. Commercial interest in and profitability of ?opera? has not translated into new popular audiences in the opera house.
