Pierpaolo Polzonetti, the Jan and Beta Popper Professor of Music at UC Davis, has published a new book, Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet, with the University of Chicago Press. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when [Richard] Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini.