Epyllia and Epithalamia: Some Narrative Frames for Early Opera

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-399
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Early Opera

Glorious Apollo: Poetic and Political Themes in the First Opera

1979 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Russano Hanning
Keyword(s):  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Early Opera

Historians of early opera have occasionally noted the appropriateness of Orpheus’ appearance as artistic spokesman for the new art form. Poet-singer par excellence of antiquity, whose music shook the very depths of the universe as he retrieved Eurydice from the Underworld, Orpheus surely appealed to the early opera composers and their humanist program—to recreate the moving power of an entirely sung drama by forging a new union of poetry, music, and gesture.In the history of opera, however, primacy of place must be given to the god Apollo, for the legend of Apollo and Daphne was the subject of the first favola per musica, La Dafne, written by Ottavio Rinuccini, with music composed by Jacopo Corsi and Jacopo Peri, and first performed in 1598 at Corsi's home in Florence.

The Augustinian Ascent

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-240
Author(s):  
Michael Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Relational Model ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Philosophy Of Love ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Styles ◽  
Early Opera

This chapter explores different pre-modern models of emotion. It surveys the sweep of pre-modern Western music, from chant to Monteverdi, in terms of four “flavors” of emotion: the Augustinian ascent, the Thomist descent, Neoplatonism, and Epicurianism. Augustine’s philosophy of love, epitomized by affection, resonated with the surges of chant. Aquinas’s relational model of emotion, based on reciprocity, chimes with “contrapuntal” models of emotion. Neoplatonism, exemplified by Ficino’s theories, resonated with the pneumatic flow of emotion through the cosmos. Petrarchan Epicurianism is reflected in the atomism of emotion, from madrigals to early opera. All told, the history of premodern emotion illuminates the changing musical styles from Hildegard, Machaut, Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Willaert, to Monteverdi.

Monteverdi, Early Opera and a Question of Genre: The Case of Andromeda (1620)

2012 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Commissioned Works ◽  
Early Opera

ABSTRACTIn 1985, Albi Rosenthal reported his discovery of a printed libretto for the opera Andromeda, composed by Monteverdi for performance in Mantua in Carnival 1620. This libretto deserves a new examination for its dramatic content, its likely musical setting (now lost) and some fundamental questions of genre. Its patron, Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, used the librettist Hercole Marliani to broker his self-fashioning by imitating both Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), supported by Vincenzo's elder brother, and Arianna (1608), which in effect belonged to the prince's parents. Monteverdi was typically slow to produce the score. The customary explanation is his disenchantment with Mantua and his new duties at St Mark's, Venice. However, we now see that both the Gonzagas and Monteverdi used Andromeda, like others of his Mantuan-commissioned works, as a bargaining chip in a complex exchange of obligations and favours typical of the courtly world to which the composer still belonged.

The doleful airs of Euripides: The origins of opera and the spirit of tragedy reconsidered

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
BLAIR HOXBY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Baroque Opera ◽  
Early Opera

Scholarly consensus denies a real connection between ancient tragedy and early opera because music historians have measured early operas against an idealised conception of Attic tragedy. However, the pioneers of opera were seeking to revive a Euripidean style of musical tragedy as it was performed in the ‘decadent’ theatres of the Hellenistic era. Euripides's tragedies established conventional relationships between musical expression and the representation of the passions. Baroque opera is seen as a strongly complex reading of a set of Euripidean tragedies that enjoyed favour in the Hellenistic era but fell from critical grace in the nineteenth century. These plays hold the key to opera's tragic pretensions; the esteem they long enjoyed should prompt us to reconsider the spirit of tragedy and the nature of catharsis.

Why Venice? Venetian Society and the Success of Early Opera

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Muir
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
New Form ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Opera

Why did opera first succeed as a public art form in Venice between 1637 and 1650 when all the elements of the new form were fully evident? The answer is to be found in the conjunction between Venetian carnival festivity and the intellectual politics of Venetian republicanism during the two generations after the lifting of the papal interdict against Venice in 1607. During this extraordinary period of relatively free speech, which was unmatched elsewhere at the time, Venice was the one place in Italy open to criticisms of Counter Reformation papal politics. Libertine and skeptical thought flourished in the Venetian academies, the members of which wrote the librettos and financed the theaters for many of the early Venetian operas.

Aspects of early opera

Early Music ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol XXII (2) ◽  
pp. 322-324
Author(s):  
James Harr
Keyword(s):  
Early Opera

Mother Hubbard's cupboard: early opera in Opera Grove

Early Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol XXVI (4) ◽  
pp. 669-672
Author(s):  
Michael Burden
Keyword(s):  
Early Opera
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