Anthony R. DelDonna, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Music Program at Georgetown University. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century topics, in particular Neapolitan music, musicians and culture. Professor DelDonna's research has focused primarily on opera, archival studies, performance practice and ballet, and has been published in the peer-reviewed journals, Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Recercare, Studi musicali and Civiltà musicale and in various scholarly collections on eighteenth-century music. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera (with Pierpaolo Polzonetti; 2009) and editor for Genre in Eighteenth-Century Music (2008). Professor DelDonna is the co-editor (with Anna Celenza) of the forthcoming book, In Pursuit of a Cultural Mission: The Jesuits and Music and a collection of clarinet and piano transcriptions by Ferdinando Sebastiani (with Antonio Caroccia for Castejon Music Editions) as well as a forthcoming critical edition of the oratorio Trionfo per l'Assunzione della Santissima Vergine for the series Fondazione Arcadia.

Introduction; 1: Opera, Antiquity, and the Neapolitan Enlightenment in Paisiello's Socrate immaginario (1775); 2: Naples, carnevale and the commedia per musica; 3: Giovanni Paisiello's Elfrida; 4: Nationalism, Cultural Identity and the Modern Neapolitan Kingdom; 5: Debora e Sisara and the Rise of Lenten Tragedy; 6: At the Precipice of Revolution; 7: The Neapolitan Ballet d'Action; 8: The Neapolitan Ballet d'Action and the Art of Experimentation

Anthony R. DelDonna provides a rich study of operatic culture from 1775-1800. The book demonstrates how contemporary stage traditions, stimulated by the Enlightenment, engaged with and responded to the changing social, political, and artistic contexts of the late eighteenth century in Naples. It focuses on select, yet representative, compositions from different genres of opera that illuminate the diverse contemporary cultural forces shaping these works and underlining the continued innovation and European recognition of operatic culture in Naples.