* Meyerbeer in Nineteenth-Century Italian Criticism and the Idea of “Musical Drama”

The meaning of the bicentenary that solemnizes Verdi and Wagner two hundred years after their birth essentially derives from the emotion of facing two personalities extraordinary for their creative energy and inventive continuity. In all fields of art and culture, the late Nineteenth century image is conditioned by their presence. Born the very same year, they both looked for and created by themselves the accomplishments that musicians of the previous generation already possessed when they were barely twenty years old. They reached almost at the same time both the revelation of their personality (Der fliegende Holländer 1841, Nabucco 1842), and the fullness of their artistic means (Rigoletto 1851, Der Rheingold 1853), before attaining the acme of their trajectory with the astonishing operosity of their final years.While the analogy of this parallel course is impressive, the individuality of their creative patrimony is no less strong. This dissimilarity – more than on aesthetic or dramaturgic reasons, such as the distinction between naif and sentimental, or between “melodrama” and “musical drama” – rests on the different environments where it took root, each of them with its own alternative ideas of bourgeois society, of relationship with the public, the contemporary theatre and literature: that’s why it is important today to engage to enlighten the cultural and social contexts in which the genius of the two masters developed.

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Musical Evita Andrew Lloyda Webbera na tle wybranych gatunków muzyki scenicznej XIX i XX wieku* / Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Musical Evita in the Context of Selected Genres of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Stage Music

Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska sectio L – Artes ◽

10.1515/umcsart-2015-0007 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Wojciech Bernatowicz

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Large Scale ◽

Analytical Study ◽

Musical Language ◽

Structural Element ◽

Musical Drama ◽

Stage Music ◽

Formal Relations ◽

Grand Opera

AbstractThe analytical study of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Evita contains inter alia the description of the libretto, and the analysis of architectural-formal, rhythmical, and melodic features and stylization devices. In architectural terms, Evita shows the influences of operetta, heroic opera, and musical drama (e.g. in large integrated blocks of scenes, and characteristic final scenes). In the internal formal relations in the piece, the links with the nineteenth-century heroic opera are observable. Regarding the use of form, the composers utilizes those that appeared in Romantic Italian and French operas, while the stylization devices present in the piece have their reference to the nineteenth-century operatic forms in France and operetta compositions. An important structural element of Evita is reminiscence motifs referring inter alia to grand opera. The conscious use of these motifs on such a large scale that have no equivalents in operetta or in the genres preceding the emergence of musical, and in other musicals, causes Evita to be closer to opera in its motivic concept. Owing to the exceptional musical language combining tradition and the present, Webber’s work is an example that the musical as a form of sublime entertainment can also satisfy the requirements of high art.

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“Sous le rythme de la chanson”

Music Theory Online ◽

10.30535/mto.21.3.9 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 21 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Pau

Keyword(s):

French Text ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Text Setting ◽

Musical Drama ◽

French Opera ◽

Critical Attention ◽

French Composers

The issue of “bad declamation” in French opera drew significant critical attention from composers and scholars in the long nineteenth century, with writers such as Castil-Blaze, Saint-Saëns, and d’Indy noting down perceived faults in French text setting. In this article, I examine examples of “mistreated accents” in nineteenth-century French opera, arguing that French composers from Grétry and Auber to Gounod and Bizet often used rhythm and text setting as a way to differentiate between two different kinds of operatic music: non-diegetic music (singing as speech) and diegetic music (singing as song). The diegetic style was also extended to situations where dance and military topics were used to depict characters performing to onstage audiences. I apply this framework to selected excerpts from Bizet’sCarmenin order to examine the part played by contrasting text-setting styles in the construction of that work’s musical drama.

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