2000 Reviews

Mary Hunter. The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment.

Monson, Dale E.

Monson's review of Mary Hunter's The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's
Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment, describes the unique methodology Hunter implements analyzing Mozart. Hunter's work, Monson explains, establishes a pattern for interpreting opera that will
surely be imitated. If her thoroughly systematic approach to unraveling meaning in opera is followed in similarly uncompromising, contextual analysis, there is much of eighteenth-century opera, of all kinds and locations, that we will yet learn.