Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520254260
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520254260
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 712

Get Book

Book Description
"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520934566
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 716

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Book Description
Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general. Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions—musical, dramatic, practical—that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.

Opera in Seventeenth-century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-century Venice PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520068087
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 684

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Book Description
Describes how forty years of accutely conscious development by composers, librettists, singers, and others in Venice established the conventions which turned opera from a courtly entertainment into an art form found on the stages of all Europe

Emblems of Eloquence

Emblems of Eloquence PDF Author: Wendy Heller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520919343
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520933279
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.

Studies in Seventeenth-Century Opera

Studies in Seventeenth-Century Opera PDF Author: BethL. Glixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351547631
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
The past four decades have seen an explosion in research regarding seventeenth-century opera. In addition to investigations of extant scores and librettos, scholars have dealt with the associated areas of dance and scenery, as well as newer disciplines such as studies of patronage, gender, and semiotics. While most of the essays in the volume pertain to Italian opera, others concern opera production in France, England, Spain and the Germanic countries.

Inventing the Opera House

Inventing the Opera House PDF Author: Eugene J. Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421741
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book examines the invention of the architecture of the modern opera house in Italy between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries.

Inventing the Business of Opera

Inventing the Business of Opera PDF Author: Beth Glixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195342976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stages of Venice during the seventeenth century. All of the components necessary to opera production are highlighted, from the financial backing, to the libretto and the score, to the singers, dancers, the scenery, and the costumes.

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia Dell’Arte

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia Dell’Arte PDF Author: Emily Wilbourne
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640157X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later. Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater. Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.

Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century

Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Simon Towneley Worsthorne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dramatic music
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description