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Author : David Charlton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1986-03-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780521251297
First published in 1986, this major study in English explores Grétry and opéra-comique between 1768 and 1791.
Author : R.J. Arnold
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781134803699
Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Author : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 780 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2010-04-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781443821681
Opéra-comique, like grand opéra, a specifically French genre of opera, emerged from the political changes and intellectual discussion that played a recurrent role in determining the nature of artistic expression and production in Paris from the late 17th until the mid-18th centuries. Opéra-comique is distinguished by its use of spoken dialogue to link the arias and sung parts, and its more restrained use of recitatives. It emerged out of the popular entertainments, called opéras-comiques en vaudevilles, that were a feature of the theatres held at the seasonal Parisian fairs of St Germain and St Laurent, and of the Comédie-Italienne. The similarity of the entertainments provided by the Comédie-Italienne and the fairs resulted in their amalgamation on 3 February 1756, when they established a theatre for their joint productions, the Hôtel Bourgogne. Their type of entertainment, combining existing popular tunes with spoken sections, lent its generic name to this house, which, regardless of its changing venue, would become known as the Opéra-Comique. The genre of opéra-comique exercised a powerful popular appeal because of its unique fusion of fixed musical form with fluid improvised dialogue. The well-known airs of the day, invariably strophic, came to be the genre’s staple medium of artistic expression—the couplets. But opéra-comique was not necessarily comic or light in nature. Indeed, the most famous example, Bizet’s Carmen (1875), is a tragedy. The genre, with its unique mixture of comedy and drama, its captivating musical fluency, its handling of serious and Romantic themes—expertly crafted by its most famous librettist Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791-1861)—became universally popular in the masterpieces of its heyday between 1820 and 1870: Adrien Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1825), Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s Fra Diavolo (1830) and Le Domino noir (1837), Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa (1831) and Le Pré aux clercs (1832), Fromental Halévy’s L’Éclair (1835) and Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon (1866). The history of the opéra-comique between 1762 and 1915 reflects the political and cultural life of France—from the last days of the ancien régime, through the tumult of the Revolution and Napoleonic era, the July Monarchy and Second Empire, to the shattering defeat of France by Prussia in 1870. After this, apart from isolated works (by Bizet, Delibes, Offenbach, Massenet), new works by the younger generation of musicians now tended to be French adaptations of the Wagnerian aesthetic and the record of success is very thin. Hardly any native French works in this imitative mode premiered at the Opéra-Comique between 1870 and 1915 have survived—apart from Debussy’s unique Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). This study serves as a sourcebook for this very French genre, with details of forgotten composers, their operas—performance dates, plot summaries, the singers who created them, the names of important numbers in the works (from libretti and scores that are either now to be found only in the Paris libraries, or are lost completely), often with contemporary observations about the reception of particular works, the effectiveness of their dramaturgy and music. It provides a resource for operatic culture and convention, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. The record of the fortunes of the Opéra-Comique provides a way into the changing culture and aesthetic values of an age.
Author : Julia Doe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226743394
Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.
Author : Guy A. Marco
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 655 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2002-05-03
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781135578015
Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.
Author : Philippe Vendrix
Publisher : Editions Mardaga
Page : 396 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Composers
ISBN : 2870094833
Author : Marian Smith
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2010-08-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781400832477
Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at the Paris Opéra (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opéra during a period long celebrated for its box-office successes in both genres. Smith begins by showing how gestures were encoded in the musical language that composers used in ballet and in opera. She moves on to a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the gestures of the singers and the movements of the dancers, and the distinction between dance that represents dancing (entertainment staged within the story of the opera) and dance that represents action. Smith maintains that ballet-pantomime and opera continued to rely on each other well into the nineteenth century, even as they thrived independently. The "divorce" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score for Giselle. ?
Author : DowningA. Thomas
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351555708
This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them. Topics covered include transformations of literary sources and their migration into the operatic genre; works that move across geographical and social boundaries into different cultural contexts; movements between media and/or genre as well as alterations through interpretation and performance of the composer's creation; the translation of spoken theatre to lyric theatre; the theoretical issues contingent on the rendering of 'speech' into 'song'; and the transforming effects of aesthetic considerations as they bear on opera. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries between music, literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history, the volume enriches our knowledge and understanding of the operatic experience and the works. The book will therefore appeal to those working in the field of music, literary and cultural studies, and to those with a particular interest in opera and musical theatre.
Author : David Charlton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2021-12-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781316515846
A major re-orientation in understanding opera, exploring musical comedies with spoken dialogue previously excluded from historical accounts.
Author : David Charlton,Mark Ledbury
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-15
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780429640254
Originally published in 2000, this book highlights the interst Sedaine's life and work is now, belatedly, provoking in many scholarly disciplines. If Sedaine speaks today to literary history, theatre history and opera studies, it is because he possessed a multivalent vision, one which accounts for both his past neglect and is present rediscovery. Like many others, he believed that the established, 'official' genres needed to be reformed; unlike many, he made it his business to transform the actual language and operation of the theatre arts he practised. Until late eighteenth-century opera and drama in France become better understood, Sedaine's immense importance for the development of Romantic opera and theatre risks remaining generally concealed; to reveal something of this importance is one main reason for publishing the present volume. This book includes chapters on Sedaine and the question of genre, the representation of the female in the dramas of Sedaine, and the words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine.
Author : Barrington James
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2021-07-20
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781476642024
For decades, eighteenth-century Paris had been declining into a baroque backwater. Spectacles at the opera, once considered fit for a king, had become "hell for the ears," wrote playwright Carlos Goldoni. Then, in 1774, with the crowning of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Paris became one of the world's most vibrant musical centers. Austrian composer Christophe-Willibald Gluck, protege of the queen, introduced a new kind of tragic opera--dramatic, human and closer to nature. The expressive pantomime known as ballet d'action, forerunner of the modern ballet, replaced stately court dancing. Along the boulevards, people whistled lighter tunes from the Italian opera, where the queen's favorite composer, Andre Modeste Gretry, ruled supreme. This book recounts Gluck's remaking of the grand operatic tragedy--long symbolic of absolute monarchy--and the vehement quarrels between those who embraced reform and those who preferred familiar baroque tunes or the sweeter melodies of Italy. The turmoil was an important element in the ferment that led to the French Revolution and the beheading of the queen.
Author : Jacqueline Letzter,Robert Adelson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2001-08-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520226531
At the same time it demonstrates how the Revolution fostered many dreams and ambitions for women that would be doomed to disappointment in the repressive post-Revolutionary era.".
Author : Simon Trezise
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2015-02-19
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780521877947
This accessible Companion provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to French music from the early middle ages to the present.
Author : Donald J. Grout,Hermine Weigel Williams
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 1047 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2003-07-18
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780231507721
When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have. The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day. A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included. With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.
Author : Hervé Lacombe
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2001-01-12
Category : Music
ISBN : 0520217195
A lively history of French opera in its cultural and historical context by one of France's leading musicologists.
