Framing the Tragédie en musique: Defining a Genre

Inspired by Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis, print culture, early-modern reading practices, and contemporaneous artwork, this paper considers some of the ways in which poets, composers, stage and theatre designers used framing techniques to both delineate their works and, by speaking self-referentially about the work’s content, guide spectatorial engagement and interpretation. Using imagery from published scores and libretti as well as musical and poetic analysis it will introduce a number of approaches that can be applied to prologues, ouvertures, entr’actes and dénouements.