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Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth Century Venice.

Article Excerpt
Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth Century Venice. By Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xxvi, 398 p. ISBN 0-195-15416-9. $50.00] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

As they make clear in the preface, Beth and Jonathan Glixon have been working on this book for many years, and their work is both long awaited and well worth the wait. Inventing the Business of Opera is not intended for the casual reader; it jumps headfirst into the business of opera in its earliest commercial period. As such, it is a book of extremes: it is extremely well-researched and extremely dense; it also makes no apologies for assuming of its readers a thorough grounding not only of the subject but of its principal players, their work, and the social situation in seventeenth-century Venice. For background on this specialized topic, a reader would be well-advised to begin with Simon Towneley Worsthorne's Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954) or Ellen Rosand's Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) before venturing into this work.

To be sure, this topic is increasingly of interest to scholars, and as such, the book is of great importance to current studies of opera and the arts industry as a whole. In this work, the Glixon...

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