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May 15, 2023 · The competing traditions of spoken drama in France, England, Germany, and Spain held sway for much of the 17th century, and produced theatrical works that were siblings of Italian operas but included passages of spoken dialogue (e.g., the English masque, the German Singspiel, etc.). The public’s concern over the lack of verisimilitude in fully sung opera also drove a hybrid solution, where ...
- Origins and Development.
- Monteverdi 's Operas.
- From Court to Theater.
- Transformations on The Venetian Stage.
- Opera spreads.
- Arcadian Reforms.
- Sources
The musical dramas known as "operas" today trace their origins to the experiments concerned with recreating the drama of the ancients that occurred in Florence in the late sixteenth century as well as to older forms of intermedi and intermezzi—musical interludes that were performed as short works between the acts of comedies and dramas or within ot...
In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo had set a new standard for operatic production. For his subject Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio had chosen the ancient myth of Orpheus, the god who was able to shape the outcome of history through his musical powers. Monteverdi's earliest opera did not break completely from the tradition of stag...
By the time Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea was performed in Venice, opera had already begun to emerge from its early history as a humanistic court entertainment nurtured in Italian courts. The earliest operas had often been lavish and expensive spectacles performed before invited guests or at the marriage festivities of important nobles. In ...
As the competition heated up between the city's opera houses, lavish spectacle and the intermingling of comic and serious elements that Cavalli and Cesti displayed in their works became increasingly common. The quality of singing also became more important to audiences, and operas now filled up with arias that were written to showcase performers' t...
As Venetian opera emerged as an important force on the Italian cultural landscape, its customs and production methods spread first throughout Italy and then beyond the peninsula to Northern Europe. A key element in the diffusion of Venetian opera to other regions was the touring companies that impresarios gathered to perform operas in various citie...
Still, not everyone approved of the lavish taste for spectacle and the confused mixture of plots and subplots that sometimes found their way onto the new opera stages of Europe. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, critics at Venice and from throughout Europe began to attack as absurd thecrowd-pleasing productions that had grown incr...
Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, Opera Production and Its Resources. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago; London: University of ChicagoPress, 1998). Roger Parker, The Oxford History of Opera (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996). Stanley Sadie, ed., History of Opera(Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989). —, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Op...
Aria (“air” in Italian) – a solo song performed during an opera. Baroque – post-Renaissance epoch named for the Portuguese word “barroco” (“gaudy”). Da Capo (“from the top” in Italian) – a term used to describe an aria in two parts that circles back to the first part before it finishes.
By the late seventeenth century, opera was established in Venice, Naples, Florence, and Milan. Singers were the stars of opera, often commanding much higher fees than composers, and arias were the main musical attraction. Aria types There were many types of aria, but by the end of the century, the most prevalent form was the da capo aria.
Opera developed in western Europe in the early 17th century as a means of bringing together all the arts, including painting, poetry, drama, dance and music. Our collections document its evolution from early Baroque extravaganzas through to contemporary productions. Opera's early origins. Initially enjoyed in the Italian and French royal ...
Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form. 978-0-231-50772-1. Music. When first published in 1947, A Short History of Operaimmediately achieved international status as a classic in thefield.
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Jul 13, 2020 · Considering that the country went through two revolutions, including an interregnum when music was ostensibly banned, there was a surprising amount of music theatre in England in the 17th century, and like other countries artists, performers and aristocrats eagerly experimented music and drama, sometimes creating something which we would recognise as opera, and sometimes coming up with hybrid ...
