caa a22 4500 386327440 CHVBK 20180307111658.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198911 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0954586700003025 doi S0954586700003025 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0954586700003025 Hepokoski James A. Genre and content in mid-century Verdi: ‘Addio, del passato' (La traviata, Act III) [Elektronische Daten] [James A. Hepokoski] In the attempt to construct the ‘story' of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts' that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress': a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics'. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects'. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity [...]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching'? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable'. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Cambridge Opera Journal Cambridge University Press 1/3(1989-11), 249-276 0954-5867 1:3<249 1989 1 OPR https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586700003025 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586700003025 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Hepokoski James A. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Cambridge Opera Journal Cambridge University Press 1/3(1989-11), 249-276 0954-5867 1:3<249 1989 1 OPR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge