La seduzione "queer" di Fedra

This book is one of the few Italian contributions to musicological gender research. Between the 1970s and the new millennium, the Phaedra myth is encountered three times in contemporary music theater thanks to the three composers Benjamin Britten, Sylvano Bussotti and Hans Werner Henze, all of whom were also homosexual. Their scenic-musical results from their preoccupation with the ancient tale of incestuous and consequently socially ostracized love are interpreted here as mediators who convey the request of three authors who, based (explicitly or rather covertly) on their own experiences, narrate on the stage the fromen of erotic needs that do not conform to the norm. Using existing archival material, the book examines the various adaptations of the material by analyzing the scores, which are seen as sites of dialectical tensions between the composers' identities and their historical-social contexts. Through the libretto and dramaturgy, which use the literary sources to give voice to identities that do not conform to the norm, the score reveals how music, as the most "untouchable" of the arts, can also tell us about human traits that are hushed up in the real world because they are considered taboo.