Late eighteenth-century French and Italian culture reflected an obsession with love and relationships through literature, music, and other art forms. Seduction scenes are one type of commentary on relationships that dot the landscape of opera of the time. The operatic seduction scene involves not only the two characters on stage but also a third agent – the music. After situating operatic seduction in the broader context of late eighteenth-century French and Italian culture, this thesis outlines the specific musical vocabulary of seduction that was put to use by composers, enacted on stage, and understood by audiences. This vocabulary is then applied to several case studies in the music of Mozart, who is now viewed as the dominant opera composer of the time, and his contemporaries. Through creative application and manipulation of the musical language of seduction, composers create ambiguous situations and invest the music with dramatic agency, allowing it to support, subvert, or otherwise comment on the seduction occurring on stage
