Valeria De Lucca is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. Her research engages with the social and political implications of production, staging and circulation of opera and musical theater, with a particular emphasis on women patrons and on the lives and careers of female singers in early modern Italy.
This veritable tour-de-force will surely become the standard study of the patronage of theater in seventeenth-century Rome. Meticulously researched, and richly illustrated, The Politics of Princely Entertainment brings to life all the allure and fascination surrounding one of Italy's most (in)famous power couples, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and Maria Mancini Colonna, and the musical culture they fostered. * Beth L. Glixon, co-author of Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice * The Politics of Princely Entertainment is a magisterial investigation of the culture of opera, oratorio, and cantata in the mid-17th century. Through a bounty of mostly first-hand documents, Valeria De Lucca gives us a tour of the lives of a couple of aristocrats of the highest rank who were deeply involved in the cultivation of music across Rome, Venice, Spain, and Naples. A splendid accomplishment. * Lorenzo Bianconi, University of Bologna *