SCHOOL OF ARTS AND AESTHETICS, JNU
During the sixteenth century, music became a very important element of court life, in particular in Italy. The Florentine court with the new grandukes Medici, gave music new political dimensions. This aimed both at impressing its aristocracy and the people of Florence, with celebrations of important dynastic events such as marriages and even more at dazzling and impressing foreign princes during their travels through Italy.
During these years, beyond the usual dancing entertainments, the Medici court saw the birth and development of a new genre destined to become a major success : the opera.
After presenting a large panorama showing the presence of musicians at the court and the functiong of the Medici musical patronage, this talk will examine two major musical events with a strong political significance : the representations of the operas Euridice (1600) for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici with Henri IVth, king of France, and of La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina (1625) for the prince Ladislaw Sigismond Wasa, future king of Poland’s vist to Florence.
Prof. Jean Boutier is Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (Marseille) and former director of the Norbert Elias Centre in Social Sciences (2002-2011). Specialist of comparative social history of early modern Europe, he has lectured in many universities in Europe, the United States and India. He has been Fulbright Scholar (Cornell, 2001), Marc Bloch Professor (Berlin, 2008), Fellow of the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (New Delhi, 2009), and visiting professor at the University of Michigan (2015). His published works (20 books and more than one hundred articles in French, Italian, German, English and Spanish) span a wide range of subjects dealing with the main social, political and cultural dynamics of early modern European society. He is currently working on a comparative study of the European nobilities through the Grand Tour (16th-18th c.).
