In this episode, Erin Helyard discusses the music scene — those moments in opera where music itself is the topic, and the characters allude to singing or playing or they actually sing a song! Because everything else is sung, how do these “songs” function? Erin explains that there are three kinds of music scene: the song-within-the-opera, the gratuitous music scene, and “meta-opera” (where opera is itself referenced). Erin delves into examples of the music scene from operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and uncovers how librettists, composers, and performers responded to this most interesting of challenges.

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