The concert arias of Mozart: eighteenth-century operatic culture outside the theater

Although the term “concert aria” is a later scholarly appellation applied after Mozart’s lifetime to a group of his works which were not considered a unified genre in the eighteenth century, there are still through-lines which bind them together. In considering the “true” concert arias for unstaged concert performance as well as substitution arias in works by other composers, I propose a way of understanding the commonalities among these pieces that further illuminates how operatic culture was received outside the theater in the late eighteenth century. By examining these pieces in light of their origin in the private-public space of salons and house concerts as well as the public concert, I show that the juxtaposition of private and public aesthetics obtains across the whole repertoire. In this way, I argue for an understanding of the concert aria as a genre that includes a more diverse range of Mozart’s miscellaneous operatic works than simply the “true” concert arias.Building on this formulation, I analyze the ways in which Mozart achieves surprising stylistic idiosyncrasies in these works through three different lenses. First, I examine the arias that set texts previously set by other composers in light of questions of influence and emulation to determine how Mozart’s motivations in creating these settings affected their particular compositional features. Second, I analyze the arias that set texts by Pietro Metastasio in terms of their adherence to Cartesian and Enlightenment philosophies. Finally, I compare the concert arias of the 1780s to Mozart’s full-length opera seria works, Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, in order to show that these arias do not act as experiments in stylistic innovation to be used later in an opera but rather present opportunities for playing with stylistic features such as forms, instrumental solos, and virtuosic vocal writing for their own sake. In this dissertation, I provide a conceptual and methodological framework that could be applied on a larger scale to similar works by other eighteenth-century composers. In doing so, I attempt to advance our understanding of the role of operatic music outside the theater and to show that these miscellaneous pieces are as interesting and worthy of study as the full-length operas by Mozart or any other composer.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference