Comparing Opera Seria to Orfeo Ed Euridice by Gluck and the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart

Orchestrally, it is scored for strings, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, two flutes, one piccolo, two oboes, one English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, two harps, and one cimbasso. Musically, this opera is very directly vigorous. It sticks to the widely used concepts of arias, duets, finales, and choruses. His fine music often excused the glaring faults in character and plot lines.

While at the Salzburg court, Mozart composed his only violin concertos, as well as his first piano concertos. However, Mozart grew discontent with his work at court when his desire to work on operas was not encouraged. Mozart began looking for alternative employment in 1777 with a journey to Paris with his mother. While on his tour of Paris, he had financial difficulty, and fell to pawning valuables. While he was gone, his father worked to secure a better position for Mozart in the Salzburg court, and after the death of his mother, Mozart returned to Salzburg. However, his discontent was little diminished, and he left for Vienna in 1781. There, he worked as a freelance composer and performer, and established himself as one of the best keyboard players in Vienna. This period of Mozart’s life saw his marriage to Constanze Weber, as well as moderately great success with his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). Over the next few years, Mozart mounted a number of concerts featuring himself as a piano soloist which pushed him to great success and high accolades from his audience. Mozart also began to realize moderate financial success, which led him to adopt a more opulent lifestyle. Incidentally, this increase in lifestyle would lead to financial difficulties later. Around 1786, Mozart began collaborating with Lorenzo Da Ponte on two very successful operas, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni. Soon after, Mozart secured a

Oratorios were performed in prayer halls, which was a sacred setting similar to the cantata. Oratorios were recitative and contained de capo arias and chorus, like the Italian opera. It was sung drama performed without staging or costumes. “The catholic church saw the power of operas and was quick to take on operas for sacred subjects, such as the lives of saints. However, the church also condemned operas for its power to seduce and dazzle, banning the performance of opera during Advent and Lent.”3 George Handel, an opera composer also composed Messiah, which was one of the best-known oratorios. Another important composer of this genre was Giacomo Carissimi, who wrote many early

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven are two of the greatest composers ever to write music. Both men lived in the early 18th and 19th century, but their music and influences are still felt today. The men faced similar experiences, yet they both lead very different lives. All together the pieces that these men composed amounts to over 300 published, and unpublished works of art. The people of their time period often had mixed feelings about these men, some “complained that Mozart’s music presented them with too many ideas and that his melodies moved from one to the next faster than audiences could follow, yet the ideas themselves seem effortless and natural, clear and

Also he had composed keyboard pieces, oratorios, symphonies, and operas. He performed his first major opera when he was fourteen it was staged in Milan in 1770 the style of the opera was opera seria, Mitriade.

The Renaissance period occurred from 1400-1600. It can be separated into third smaller periods. The early, middle, and the late period, but for the sake of this paper, they will be referred to as stages to avoid confusion. This paper will compare two composers one from the early stage and another from the late stage. The early stage composer will be John Dunstable, and the late stage composer will be Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The purpose of this paper is to compare these two composers’ composition style through the analysis of two of their works.

Handel's libretti were drawn literally from the Bible, though the verses he used were not necessarily consecutive ones. His musical style in the oratorios is a reversion to the high Baroque idiom, and in oratorio he abandonned the fashionable new stile galant touches he used in in his last operas in hopes of saving them from financial failure. His choral style resonates with fugal writing, but this too is affected by older traditions. His fugues are not the monthematic ones that German organ composers wrote to fill the time before the worship service. Instead the subjects could change as the work unfolded or the imitative texture could be abandonned altogether. The music was controlled by the dramatic needs, not requirements of musical form, and, in this respect Handel's choral fugues show a direct and strong linkage to both Grand Concerto and madrigal! Another madrigal element is Handel's use of music to set mood or depict events. In madrigal, tone painting was a rather local and sometimes puerile device; in Handel, musical depiction occurs on a grand and alomost profound scale. Handel's oratorios also approach recitative differently than opera

Opera Seria refers to a very serious opera, this style of opera was the predominant style in Europe, and was typically performed for royalty and individuals of the more affluent social classes. A non-mozart example of Opera Seria is Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel

The Renaissance and Baroque era entailed very different characteristics, due to the Renaissance composers writing more freely and being more individual then those of the Baroque era where they followed more ‘rules’ and experimented less. This essay will show the difference in two pieces by different composers, even though they were written less than a century apart.

Common characteristics of classical music include strong dynamics, changing rhythms, simplistic melodies, and homophony (Tomlinson and Kerman 155-158). When focusing on the aria played in The Shawshank Redemption, one hears the “natural use of the voice. We’re not asking the voice to do anything that it really doesn’t want to do, and it’s naturally dramatic” (Greenberg). The homophonic music accompanies Susanna’s aria, but does not over power her voice; it is simple. The changing rhythms and dynamics express Susanna’s emotions as music during the Enlightenment was considered “akin to the motions of the human soul, from which it follows that music is able to apprehend and convey the impulses and moods of the human soul” (Lang 96). These feelings, however, are not those of the Church or government institution; they are the feelings of a servant who wants to marry Fiagaro and the Countess, who is conspiring against her husband. Another introduction in comic opera was the ensemble, “a number sung by two or more people” (Tomlinson and Kerman 189). The ensemble allows the characters, Susanna and the Countess, to express their emotions simultaneously. Musically, the duet in The Marriage of Fiagaro incorporates the popular characteristics of the Classical period to express the natural emotions of two women.

Like the previous eras, Opera continued to be one of the most important music genre is the 19th century, especially in Italy, German and France. Opera served as a form of entertainment for the people of higher social class. Opera music was also popular among the people of other social classes due to the availability of transcribed opera music for them to enjoy in salons or homes of the middle class. This genre was extensively explored and developed by the Italians and Germans. This paper will discuss how Italian and German opera were developed by comparing each composer’s distinctive compositional traits.

4. While an aria is one of the main components to an opera, there are several other components that that contribute to the story line. An aria is a song for a single voice along with orchestral accompaniment. For the most

Opera in the Romantic Period was a time when opera changed drastically, especially in the country of Italy. The recognition of singers as being important, almost irreplaceable, in the art of “bel canto” opera changed the idea of a vocalist in opera forever. A singer’s voice was prized and Italian composers, like Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini wrote operas and works to showcase the voice, it’s color, range and agility. These Italian composers were moving away from the normal style of composition of the time, and the composer Rossini, who set the stage for many other followers. Many of the operas written during this time are still performed today and are highly acclaimed. For the most part, before Italy became a main player, France

The Baroque piece Orfeo: "Tu se morta” is classified as opera recitative, in this piece the singer delivered sad news to Orfeo through speech and drama. In this piece the voice of a tenor is predominant, but it also accompanied by organ and lute. Voice and some of the instruments heard and the vocal line is accompanied by a basso continuo. In order for the audience to understand the message, the texture used was homophonic and the word painting is clearly used described the past and future events such as how Euridice died and what Eorfeo was going to do in order to be with his wife in death or bring her back. Up until this moment, the piece went slow and stable in rhythm, but his end action brought different drama to the recitative.

To discover similarities in narratives in Romantic operas, I defer to Ernest Newman and George Upton, who are professional music analysts. Newman has written multiple publications on the “great” operas of Don Giovanni, Figaro, Turandot, and others. In his book The Wagner Operas, he analyzes nine of Wagner’s operas (Mastersingers of Nuremburg, The Valkyrie, Seigfired and Parsifial among others). A common theme in many of Wagner’s operas is that they involve the supernatural, and this is in agreement with the immense drama of the Romantic era operas. For example, in The Flying Dutchman, a phantom ship appears and a ghostly Dutchman (as the title suggests) requests the marriage of a sailor’s daughter to ‘redeem’ himself (Newman, 1963). Upton, has compiled plots and music of modern operas into a book published in 1926 as an addendum to his Standard Handbooks on Music. One of the operas he summarizes is that of Gioacchino Rossini’s William Tell. The death of a herdsman’s daughter at the hands of a tyrant’s follower results in the request to Tell to protect the herdsman. In a square, Tell refuses so succumb to the tyrant’s wishes and is jailed. The herdsman rounds up a rescue squad to help him and succeeds. This is a divergence from the Wagnerian obsession with the supernatural, but is still an excellent example of Romantic opera (Upton, 1926).