The development and contribution Purcell made to the operatic genre through his opera and dramatic works

In Dido and Aeneas, Dido, a widowed queen, expresses her love for Aeneas, a Trojan hero. He reciprocates the feelings but is destined to sail away to become the founder of Rome. The opera results in her committing suicide because of this. Both plots do encompass similar topics such as love and death. Since both operas were written in the Baroque period they do share that similarity and characteristics in the music style of that period. Italy was highly influential in the operas style because it was the birthplace of opera. Baroque operas were generally based on Greek legends or Roman history which fits in with the plots of the two operas.

This very much represents the physical crossing from the ‘normal’ world into a world which is not seen from the outside, and pushed to the edge of society, and further resembles a glimpse of hope for the patients’ recovery. In the later scenes of the play, during the performance of Mozart’s opera, the entire theatre has been transformed into something completely different, with its white walls, the bright, colourful costumes, and Mozart’s “music of the spheres” echoing within the once dark and dismal place. The new theatre in all its splendour metaphorically resembles the transformations of the characters themselves, and from this, the audience is encouraged to realise the significance and therapeutic nature of art, in this case theatre and music: “the music of this opera will keep the world in harmony”, especially in contrast to hopeless treatments such as shock therapy. Through his play, Nowra also encourages the audience to agree with his personal view that war is unnecessary, and in a way is a kind of madness itself, due to its chaotic and uncontrollable nature.

In 1984 Andrew Lloyd Webber, transformed the original The Phantom of the Opera novel (written in 1911 by Gaston Leroux) into a dialogic, emotional masterpiece. The prologue starts at the end of the story, in an auction in the Paris Opera House, in 1905. Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny is buying a papier-mâché music box,

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

The main objective in the performance of Renaissance music is that everything done by the singer is subservient to the text. Musicians of the Renaissance were fixated on the concept of music serving the text. Composers set poems to text attempting to imitate natural speech and inflection pattern in the rhythms of the music, and wished to write the music in such a way that the words could be understood. Singers should strive toward clear diction, making sure their vowel shapes and ornamentation do not obscure the text.

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.

Henry Purcell is seen as one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period and one of the greatest of all English composers. His earliest surviving works date from 1680 and show a complete command of musical composition. They include some fantasias for viols, masterpieces of contrapuntal writing, and more contemporary sonatas for violins, which reveal some acquaintance with Italian models. Purcell, in his time, became increasingly in demand as a composer, and his theatre music in particular made his name familiar to many who knew nothing of his church music or the odes and welcome songs he wrote for the court of three different kings over twenty-five years.

Handel's discovery of oratorio was quite accidental and came in the form of a commission from Dublin. His appreciation of its possibilites was immediate, and the die was cast that he would devote the rest of his creative life to composing in the genre.

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.

Dido’s Lament “When I am laid in earth” is an aria from the opera written in English that is included in many classical music textbooks. This piece includes word painting through text that is included on the text “darkness” and “death”. This piece was composed by Henry Purcell in the late sixteenth century and is one of England’s oldest operas and Purcell’s only opera. The chorus is “With drooping Wings” with a lament “Thy hand, Belinda”. Purcell put a good plot on this piece about tragic love. It has an Italian tradition of setting a lament over a basso ostinato, or ground bass. This piece has changing harmonies, and violins come in adding expressive dissonances to heighten the mood. Purcell used major keys to provoke happiness and minor

During the eighteenth century, composers wrote in a style of opera called opera seria.' Opera seria had the following characteristics:

Bel Canto was a form of singing that was pretty much defined by three Italian composers: Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. These three composers had huge success in Italy and their operas are still being performed to this day. These captivating operas like Il barbiere di Sivilglia, Lucia di lammermoor, and Norma are three of the most popular and challenging operas that singers can be involved in. These three composers really set the stage for the rise of Italian opera.

Susan McClary’s scholarly article, A Musical Dialect from the Enlightenment: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Mvt. 2, starts off with her recalling a time after watching a performance of the concerto with a colleague and the two of them confessing different opinions about the soloist’s performance. McClary, who liked the performance, notes that soloist articulates “unusual compositional strategies indicated in Mozart’s texts”. The argument ends with the two not only about the piece and Mozart, but also about the significance of the eighteenth-century. McClary’s article attempts to critique the perfection of Mozart’s works.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was probably the greatest genius in Western musical history. He was born in Salzberg, Austria on January 27, 1756. The son of Leopold Mozart and his wife Anna Maria Pertl. Leopold was a successful composer and violinist and assistant concertmaster at the Salzberg court.