Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde

Who’d have thought that a book on the apparently recondite subject of opera in Venice in the ten years between 1951-1961 could yield such richness of political and cultural analysis of post-war Italy as does this widely researched, and compellingly written and argued, study? Harriet Boyd-Bennett takes six key performances presented at La Fenice opera house in Venice during these years (the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951; the first modern revival of Verdi’s early Risorgim..