Giving La Traviata a Contemporary Twist?How Market Identity Shapes Hybridity in Italian Opera

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
pp. 16133
Author(s):  
Giulia Cancellieri
Keyword(s):  
Italian Opera ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Market Identity

Genre and content in mid-century Verdi: ‘Addio, del passato’ (La traviata, Act III)

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Hepokoski
Keyword(s):  
Important Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Standard Practice ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Structural Types ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
La Traviata

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.

Truffles and Radishes, Food and Wine at the Opera

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Plotkin
Keyword(s):  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Real Place ◽  
The World ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Title Character

“It’s raining truffles, radishes and fennels,” says Sir John Falstaff, the richly humane and deeply funny title character of Giuseppe Verdi’s final masterpiece. While there are many ways that food, wine and other libations have been used in opera, somehow this line best captures both the grandeur and common touch that opera and gastronomy possess. For every rare and fragrant truffle, there are plenty of common but no less essential radishes and fennels, all of which have their metaphorical place in opera and real place in cookery. Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was probably the most important Italian creative artist since the Renaissance. Not only was he the foremost composer of Italian opera and, for many, the greatest opera composer of all, but he was a knowledgeable gastronome and farmer as well. His most famous operas include tragedies and dramas such as Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aïda and Otello, but it was in his last work, the human comedy Falstaff, that he achieved his fullest expression of a philosophy that believes ‘All the world is a joke and man is born a clown.’

Verdian opera burlesqued: a glimpse into mid-Victorian theatrical culture

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-66
Author(s):  
ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Preliminary Examination ◽  
Art Form ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Theatrical Culture

Through brief case studies of burlesques of Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata written for nineteenth-century London, this essay makes a preliminary examination of the nature of Victorian operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences in an evolving socio-cultural milieu, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London.

Verdi and the End of Italian Coloratura

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-94
Author(s):  
Sean M. Parr
Keyword(s):  
Italian Opera ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Musical Forms

Verdi’s compositional influence and emphatic involvement in promoting his operas in Paris make him an important force, with an operatic oeuvre that includes works that can be labeled “French” because of his use of French literary sources and musical forms. During his career, Verdi’s use of coloratura changed greatly, but key examples are still found in his middle-period operas, in Rigoletto, La traviata, and Les Vêpres siciliennes. This chapter examines how these moments of coloratura signify much more than their apparently straightforward melismatic text treatment might suggest. Arias such as “Caro nome” employ coloratura to suggest a dramatic subtext, uncovering the inner psychological voice of the character. Close readings of these arias suggest that Verdi’s use of coloratura serves as an omen, foreshadowing tragedy for the character singing. With these mid-century examples, we see that Verdi as a modern composer in a sense writes coloratura out of Italian opera.

Dancing in Early Productions of The Beggar's Opera

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Jeremy Barlow ◽  
Moira Goff
Keyword(s):  
Political Corruption ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The Many

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was accepted for production by John Rich, manager at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and received its premiere in January 1728. With its twin satirical targets of Italian opera and political corruption, and its fresh approach to musical entertainment, the opera had an unprecedented success during its first season and continued to be performed every year in London for the remainder of the century. Alongside the many songs, the libretto indicates three contrasting ensemble dances, introduced at key moments of the drama. These dances have been overlooked in most studies of The Beggar's Opera. The article investigates the significance of the dances within the ballad opera, the dancers who may have performed them and what they may have been dancing. Each dance and its music is analysed in detail, and placed within the context of the dance repertoire and wider theatrical background at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The authors also demonstrate the importance of dance in attracting audiences at Lincoln's Inn Fields; and show how, as box office receipts for The Beggar's Opera eventually declined, Rich stimulated demand by introducing divertissements and entr'acte dances unrelated to the show.

La Traviata Affair

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilde Roos
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Group A ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Opera Production ◽  
The Way

Opera, race, and politics during apartheid South Africa form the foundation of this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a so-called colored cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Time of Apartheid charts Eoan’s opera activities from its inception in 1933 until the cessation of its work by 1980. By accepting funding from the apartheid government and adhering to apartheid conditions, the group, in time, became politically compromised, resulting in the rejection of the group by their own community and the cessation of opera production. However, their unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera lead to the most extraordinary of performance trajectories. During apartheid, the Eoan Group provided a space for colored people to perform Western classical art forms in an environment that potentially transgressed racial boundaries and challenged perceptions of racial exclusivity in the genre of opera. This highly significant endeavor and the way it was thwarted at the hands of the apartheid regime is the story that unfolds in this book.

Operatic Canons and Repertories in Italy c. 1900

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Jutta Toelle
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Opera Houses

This chapter outlines how a fundamental crisis arose in Italian opera houses by 1900, shaped by the focus on canonic repertory as it was defined by the leading theaters and music publishers. Planning of repertory became focused on specific kinds of operas—in effect a canonic typology—from which a work was chosen as appropriate to a specific season or social context. Eventually, this repertory came to be perceived as finite, establishing certain canonic types as standard choices for the organization of a theater’s repertory or a publisher’s list. The leading such framework took shape most significantly in Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, devised by publishers and glorified by key artists, most significantly the conductor Arturo Toscanini. This chapter is paired with Carlotta Sorba’s “Theaters, markets, and canonic implications in the Italian opera system, 1820–1880.”

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

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