Essay on Opera

5. Smart, Mary Ann. Mimomania : music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004.

In any musical drama, be it opera, oratorio, or even musical theatre, it is possible for a composer to convey the personality of their characters through compositional and musical techniques. Doing so heightens the audience’s understanding of the characters, their motivations, and the relationships between them. Monteverdi, as a pioneer of opera, was one of the first to capitalize on this opportunity to heighten the audience’s understanding of the characters. This is highly apparent in his last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea. The music for two of the characters, Poppea and Nerone, is especially well composed to demonstrate personality, and this is no more apparent than in the dialogue which introduces the audience to them, Signor, deh

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

The choice of the “Three women of Don Giovanni” can give a good understanding of the type of music which was used to create an opera in the 18th century Italy. The opera buffa was a comic opera with a funny story line and light music. Mozart wrote at different levels.

Don Giovanni can be characterized as a comic opera due to its indulgence with tragic themes, such as crime and murder, in an astoundingly funny manner. By definition, an opera is an art form in which the composers combine dramatic works with musical scores and libretto or text in theatrical settings. The singing may be either melodic or recitative. Traditionally, operas incorporate most of the typical elements of spoken theatre, including

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.

Oratorio and cantata were two genres that re-emerged in the first half of the eighteenth century. They were already important musical alternatives to opera by the mid-seventeenth century, but differed in nearly every respect from the genres of the same names found in the early eighteenth century. As genres late in the period, they both bespoke the traditions from which they originally sprang and permitted new recombination of the musical elements of these same traditions.

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 voice is considered as the most important element in the Italian Opera. On top of the polyphonic accompaniment for the orchestra, melody

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

There were also stricter demands of the solo singers. The two mid eighteenth century composers, Jomelli and Traetta played a big part in the reform of Italian opera in the late 18th century by influencing the French towards opera of a more international flavour.

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

Monteverdi’s version of the story of the opera Orfeo it said to be a masterwork and set the operatic tone and the style for decades to follow. However, it was not the first opera written during the late Renaissance; the first supposed opera, Dafne, was written by Jacopo Peri in 1597, but has since been misplaced. Monteverdi was an accomplished composer of madrigal, and many of the arrangements and harmonic devices he employs in Orfeo would have already been familiar to his audiences. However, by imposing form and structure to the often-inconsequential business of early opera, he ensued that ‘plays with music’- as operas were commonly called in the premature days- would provide the basis of Italian musical life for four centuries. Ofreo was

The “first practice” was just the style of vocal polyphony that was established in writing by Zarlino. The “second practice” was just Claudio Monteverdi’s way of being adventurous. He said that the first practice was music that the text prevailed, and that the second practice the text overpowered the music. In Monteverdi’s cruda amarilli he demonstrates the use of his second practice. Since Monteverdi used this second practice Composers start to see instrumental music as a different medium from vocal music and because of this they started to see them separately as two components, now borrow vocal idioms in instrumental writing, and vice versa. While trying to express the affections in man, they wanted to bring about the arousal of emotions like excitement, broadness, being a hero, and wonder. While doing this they also focused on a new idea of basso continuo which was a concentration of the bass where the chord was structured on the bass, and later the inversions became known as figured bass. With this new bass a new contrapuntal system was used where the melodic lines now had to fit into the pattern of chords set up by the continuo.

The beginning of the seventeenth century marked the start of opera in Italy. The earliest opera manuscripts to survive are the two settings of Euridici by Peri and Caccini (Grout 43). Although Euridici is the first known opera, Peri and Caccini were both not considered the founder of opera, that honor was instead given to Monteverdi (Grout 51). The reason for this may be because Euridici is said to contain many imperfections including: “weakness of characterization, the limited range of emotions expressed, the lack of clear, consistent musical organization, and above all the monotony of the solo style” (Grout 49). Grout explains that Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo “represents the first attempt to apply the full resources of the art of music to opera” (53). La morte d’Orfeo was the first secular opera performed in Rome in 1619 (Grout 62). This marked the beginning of serious secular opera. Opera continued to