Viva Voce (In Person in the Casa Italiana Library or online on Zoom)

The Diva and the Maestro

Song, Poetry and Performance in Baroque Italy

A double book launch and conversation with Roseen Giles (Duke University) author of Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama) author of Margherita Costa: Diva of the Baroque Court (University of Toronto Press, 2023).

Moderated by Eugenio Refini (NYU)

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Medieval and Renaissance Center

In ENGLISH

This conversation will feature two specialists of early modern Italy, musicologist Roseen Giles and literary scholar Jessica Goethals, discussing their recent monographs, which, in different ways, address questions at the intersection of poetry, song, performance, sound studies, and drama. On the one hand, Giles’s Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2023) reconsiders a most canonical figure – Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi – through a non canonical multi-disciplinary lens; on the other, Goethals’s Margherita Costa: Diva of the Baroque Court (University of Toronto Press, 2023) explores the flamboyant career of a versatile singer/performer and prolific literary author, who defies easy categorizations.

Join us for this unusual yet promising encounter between a quintessentially Baroque diva and a quintessentially Baroque maestro, whose lives and artistic productions share much more than one might expect!

Organized by Prof. Eugenio Refini, Viva Voce is a series of events – conversations, talks, book discussions – that address the intersections of voice, performance and the mechanisms of reception. Featuring specialists from different fields, these interdisciplinary events aim to bridge across research, teaching, and public outreach.