Acknowledgments

This book represents the culmination of research carried out over the past two decades. At every stage of its elephantine gestation, I have benefitted from the encouragement and criticism of friends and colleagues. Nino Pirrotta inspired my earliest attempts to understand opera in Venice and has remained a guiding spirit, a model of passionate and humane scholarship for my work ever since. Over the course of innumerable miles in Riverside Park, and then by post and phone, my erstwhile jogging companion Piero Weiss listened to ideas, read and reread drafts, translated, edited, and bore with me. Joseph Kerman was the first to recognize the book implicit in my disparate studies and ideas on Venetian and operatic topics, and he was also the first to read through the completed manuscript (no footnotes), which he subjected to the full treatment of his characteristic critical, but always responsive, pencil.

As readers for the University of California Press, Lorenzo Bianconi examined the text with a fine-tooth comb, sparing me the embarrassment of countless minor errors and several major ones; Howard Brown, with humor and sympathy, found his share of lacunae and redundancies; and Philip Brett, going well beyond the call of duty, made many excellent stylistic suggestions. I am indebted to Gary Tomlinson for the challenge of his ideas and stimulating queries over the years and for his specific suggestions more recently; to Andrew Porter, who long ago promised me a New Yorker editorial job on the manuscript and kept his word; and to Maria Teresa Muraro, whose friendship, hospitality, encouragement, and access to the Venetian libraries at the other end of an international telephone line were invaluable assets in the completion of my work.

I am grateful, too, to my former student Beth Glixon for making fair copies of the musical examples, to Christian Moevs for a large number of translations, and to my editors at the University of California Press, above all, to Doris Kretschmer for her sustained enthusiasm, to Peter Dreyer for his gentle editorial touch, and to Jane-Ellen Long, who calmly shepherded the manuscript through the final gauntlet of publication.

It is with pleasure that I acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Rutgers Uni-

versity Research Council for their support of a succession of research trips to Venice, each of which was intended to be the last.

This book could not have been completed without the sustenance, forbearance, and considerable intervention of my family: my sons Jonathan and Eric, who grew up tolerantly—and too fast—in the company of a sibling more demanding than any sister or brother, and their father, my husband David Ro-sand, whose passion for and knowledge of things Venetian nourished mine, and whose professional skill as a writer, editor, artist, and critic and intuition as an opera lover have had their impact on every page of this volume. Finally, I wish to express publicly my immense private gratitude to my parents for having waited patiently and supportively through many difficult years for me to finish this book, and to whom I lovingly, and thankfully, dedicate it.