Books by John A Rice
Music in the Eighteenth Century takes the reader on an engrossing Grand Tour of Europe's musical ... more Music in the Eighteenth Century takes the reader on an engrossing Grand Tour of Europe's musical centers, from Naples, to London, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and St. Petersburg —with a side trip to the colonial New World. Against the backdrop of Europe's largely peaceful division into Catholic and Protestant realms, Rice shows how "learned" and "galant" styles developed and commingled. While considering Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven in depth, he broadens his focus to assess the contributions of lesser-known but significant figures like Johann Adam Hiller, Francois-André Philidor, and Anna Bon.
"Music in the Eighteenth Century is an excellent textbook that provides a solid backbone for a class on the Classical period. The textbook will keep students engaged and entertained by moving from one exciting location to another and by exploring how musical works were produced not by geniuses working in a creative vacuum, but rather by people in specific places interacting with specific social, political, and cultural conditions." Martin Nedbal, College Music Symposium
"Students lucky enough to learn from Rice's book will gain a broad, rich, and nuanced view of the eighteenth-century musical world." Margaret Butler, Journal of Music History Pedagogy
"Music in the Eighteenth Century" has been published in Spanish translation by Juan González-Castelao ( Madrid: Akal, 2019); for more information please click on the link above. For a Spanish-language talk-show about the book, with excerpts of music discussed in it, go to https://mediavod-lvlt.rtve.es/resources/TE_SHORAZU/mp3/1/8/1575645796081.mp3
El presente libro propone al lector un absorbente grand tour por los grandes centros musicales de la Europa del siglo XVIII, de Nápoles a Londres, pasando por Berlín, Viena, Praga y San Petersburgo, con una incursión en el Nuevo Mundo colonial.
Con el telón de fondo de una Europa dividida entre un espacio católico y otro protestante, el autor muestra cómo se desarrollaron y mezclaron los estilos «galante» y «culto». Además de considerar en profundidad la obra de Mozart, Haydn y el primer Beethoven, amplía el foco de su análisis para poner de relieve las contribuciones de figuras menos conocidas, pero sin duda relevantes, como Johann Adam Hiller, François-André Philidor o Anna Bon.
Excerpt from a review of the Spanish translation:
"En conjunto, se trata de un acercamiento al siglo XVIII en una discurso muy bien trabajado, pedagógico y metodológicamente acertado que, a pesar de las diferentes lagunas mencionadas, se presenta como uno de los mejores volúmenes de la serie junto con el dedicado a los siglos XX y XXI. La agudeza de su enfoque lo convierte en una lectura que entusiasma en algunos capítulos y resulta altamente enriquecedora en otros, manteniendo los ejes de transversalidad, novedad y abertura hermenéutica bajo los cuales Akal está lanzando esta colección en seis volúmenes." Albert Ferrer Flamarich, Codalario.com
Presenting a fresh approach to Mozart's achievements as a composer for the stage, John A. Rice ou... more Presenting a fresh approach to Mozart's achievements as a composer for the stage, John A. Rice outlines the composer's place in the operatic culture of his time. The book tells the story of how Mozart's operas came into existence, following the processes that he went through as he brought his operas from commission to performance. Chapters trace the series of interactions between Mozart and librettists, singers, stage designers, orchestras, and audiences. The book demonstrates how Mozart's entire operatic oeuvre is the product of a single extraordinary mind and a single pan-European operatic culture.
Comments by reviewers:
"'Mozart on the Stage' is essential reading for all who care about eighteenth-century musical theater." Margaret Butler, The Opera Quarterly
"Rice's study must count as the best portrait yet of Mozart as a man of the theatre, sharply and convincingly drawn." Ian Woodfield, Eighteenth-Century Music
"John A. Rice's book provides a superb, engrossing view of the theatrical business in eighteenth-century Germany and Italy, and the ways in which Mozart shaped and was shaped by it." Judith Malafronte, Opera News
"Rice's book deserves unending praise; it should be unreservedly extolled for its fresh approach.... Though Rice is a scholar in his prime, in some ways this study seems almost a culminating one, perhaps because he dedicates it to his long-time mentor, colleague, and friend, Daniel Heartz--among the most prominent of Mozart scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Though Heartz's legacy has undeniably gifted Rice, there is a clue to another of the persistent influences in Rice's extraordinary series of books and articles. Not surprisingly, the frontispiece of 'Mozart on the Stage' is the London portrait of the well known soprano 'La Ferrarese' (Adriana Ferrarese del Bene) who, as a member of the opera buffa troupe at the Burgtheater, sang Susanna in the 1789 revival of 'Le nozze di Figaro' and Fiordiligi in the Viennese premiere of 'Così fan tutte.' Ferrarese has been a key figure in Rice's other books, a catalyst in his research from the very beginning, a cog in the wheel of this web of interactions and intrigues in Vienna." Kay Lipton, Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America
"Affrontare un insieme di tematiche complesse quali quelle legate al rapporto tra Mozart e il teatro in un solo libro – che si ponga come obiettivi sistematici estrema chiarezza, precisione scientifica, uno sguardo complessivo e l’ offerta degli elementi-base necessari per inquadrare l’ opera del salisburghese nel panorama settecentesco a lui contemporaneo – non è certo compito facile, neppure per un decano degli studi specifici quale è John Rice, già docente di storia della musica in quattro differenti università statunitensi e autore di testi considerati fondamentali, a livello internazionale, sull’ argomento.
In ogni caso, la sfida che questo testo si propone, sarà bene dirlo subito, è pienamente vinta (e con merito) dal suo autore, che non solo riesce a fornire i parametri necessari alla comprensione della cultura operistica del tardo XVIII secolo con raro garbo e abilità didattica, ma dà struttura al proprio lavoro in modo sistematico, seppur non pedante, favorendo lo sviluppo nel lettore di una personale valutazione dell’operato di Mozart nel rapporto con le committenze, il pubblico, i collaboratori e le maestranze artistiche durante tutto il percorso di crescita professionale del musicista."
Stefano Aresi, Drammaturgia musicale https://www.iris.unina.it/retrieve/handle/11588/570171/15526/Il%20verismo%20musicale%20italiano.pdf
Between 1796 and 1800 Baron Peter von Braun, a rich businessman and manager of Vienna's court the... more Between 1796 and 1800 Baron Peter von Braun, a rich businessman and manager of Vienna's court theaters, transformed his estate at Schönau into an English-style landscape park. Among several buildings with which he embellished his garden, the most remarkable and celebrated was the Temple of Night, a domed rotunda accessible only through a meandering rockwork grotto that led visitors to believe that their destination lay somewhere deep underground. A life-size statue of the goddess Night on a chariot pulled by two horses presided over the Temple, while from the dome, which depicted the night sky, came the sounds of a mechanical musical instrument that visitors likened to the music of the spheres. Only the ruins of the Temple of Night survive, and it has received little scholarly attention. This book brings it back to life by assembling the many descriptions of it by early nineteenth-century eyewitnesses. Placing the Temple within the context of the eighteenth-century English landscape park and of Viennese culture in the fascinating period of transition from Enlightenment to Biedermeier, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of garden design, architecture, theater, and music.
Table of Contents
1. The Rise and Fall of Peter von Braun and the Temple of Night
The Design and Construction of the Temple of Night
Braun's Financial Ruin and Death and the Collapse of the Temple
2. Visiting the Temple
The Grotto
The Temple of Night
3. The Temple as Garden Folly
Grottoes
Circular Temples
The Temple in the Grotto
"Before us, Truly Everything that Chambers sang of China"
4. The Night between Enlightenment and Romanticism
"And Universal Darkness Buries All"
"How Beautiful Is Night!"
Sophie Mereau's "Schwarzburg"
Night in Hirschfeld's English Garden
The Goddess Night
The Night Sky in Neoclassical Architecture: Boullée, Lequeu, and Hohenberg
A Neoclassical Motif: Alabaster Lamps
5. Mälzel, Salieri, and the Pfeifenwerk
Mechanical Instruments in Gardens
The Viennese Flötenwerk
Mälzel at Schönau
Music for Flötenwerke
Music for Schönau
6. The Temple as Holy Place
Freemasonry and the Temple of Night
Freemasonry and Garden Design
Braun as Imaginary Jacobin
7. The Temple as Theater
Kotzebue in Vienna
Die Zauberflöte, Palmira, and Other Operas
Night on the Viennese Stage
Schinkel's Sets for Die Zauberflöte and Trzechtik's Watercolor
8. The Temple as Kunstgalerie
Mechanical Instruments
Waxworks
Combinations of Waxworks and Music
Braun's Kunstgalerie at Schönau
This is a study of the musical activities of Empress Marie Therese (1772–1807), one of the most i... more This is a study of the musical activities of Empress Marie Therese (1772–1807), one of the most important patrons in the Vienna of Haydn and Beethoven. Building on extensive archival research, including many documents published here for the first time, it describes Marie Therese's activities as commissioner, collector, and performer of music, and explores the rich and diverse musical culture that she fostered at court. This book, which will be of interest to musicologists, historians of artistic patronage and taste, and practitioners of women's studies, elucidates this remarkable woman's relations with a host of professional musicians, including Haydn, and argues that she played a significant and hitherto unsuspected role in the inception of one of the era's greatest masterpieces, Beethoven's Fidelio. Other composers discussed include Domenico Cimarosa, Joseph Eybler, Michael Haydn, Johann Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paer, Antonio Salieri, Joseph Weigl, and Paul Wranitzky.
"John A. Rice's excellent new study of the Empress Marie Therese (1772–1807) makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Vienna's musical culture. . . A highly readable portrait of an appealing and intriguing patron." Mary Sue Morrow, Eighteenth-Century Music
"One cannot help but stand in awe of the scholarship presented in this volume." Caryl Clark, JAMS
"In this consistently engrossing and revealing study, John Rice rescues from obscurity one of the key figures in the musical life of Vienna during a particularly exciting if troubled time. . . Well illustrated visually and with many musical examples, this scholarly and very enjoyable book represents musical publishing at its best." Tim Blanning, Beethoven Forum
"Maria Theresia von Neapel, Kaiserin von Österreich (Lebensdaten: 1772–1807) steht hier erstmals umfassend als Förderin der musikalischen Künste während ihrer Regentschaft mit ihrem Gatten Franz II im Fokus. Aufgrund sorgfältiger Archivrecherchen und etlicher bisher unveröffentlichter Dokumente (z. B. ein eigenes Musiktagebuch) werden Maria Theresias Aktivitäten als Sammlerin, als Musikbevollmächtigte ihres Reiches und auch als praktizierende Musikerin am Hofe genau beschrieben. Haydn, Paer, Paisiello und Beethoven (vor allem mit seinem 'Fidelio') konnten erst unter ihrer Schirm'frau'schaft ihre volle Meisterschaft entfalten."
Ariadne, Newsletter 65: Kunst & Kultur (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
"Marie Therese deserved to be brought out of the shadows; John Rice has done the job admirably." Peter Branscombe, Austrian Studies
"Rice's method is to stay close to the documents that chronicle Marie Therese's musical universe. These include copyists' bills, signed receipts, concert programmes and posters, inventories, catalogues of collections, letters and diaries. He writes with a bibliographer's precision and tenacity, choosing to begin the book with a rather forbidding discussion of the present location and call numbers of works from Marie Therese's vast collections. The book's 100 pages of appendices include Marie Therese's musical diary listing the works performed at court, 1801–03, her correspondence with Paer and Paisiello, and a catalogue of the church music she owned. All items have extensive annotation. This kind of exhaustive research makes the book a definitive guide not only to the music Marie Therese owned but to the performances and performers she sponsored." James J. Johnson, TLS
"Rice's is a model study of an enchanting subject. The rigorous documentary investigation is tempered by the attraction of the Empress's person – capricious indeed, but also deeply engaged in the promotion of contemporary music and the nurture of both professional and amateur talent. Altogether a power for good in the rich musical life of turn-of-the-century Vienna." Patricia Howard, Musical Times.
"Rice' Monographie über "die andere" Maria Theresia besticht durch ihre Fülle an Daten und das umfassende historische Hintergrundwissen; zahlreiche Tabellen und klug ausgewählte Illustrationen machen das Buch trotz der inhaltlichen Dichte übersichtlich und angenehm zu lesen – es wird sicherlich bald zu den "Klassikern" der habsburgischen Musikgeschichte zählten." Elizabeth Thérèse Fritz-Hilscher, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
"John Rice has produced a work of fundamental research for which future scholars
will be grateful. He has reconstructed Marie Therese's dispersed music library and shown how she put it together. He reveals the magnitude of her role in assembling it, as opposed to that of her husband as has usually been assumed. Drawing on her musical diary of 1801-3 (its list of concerts printed as an appendix) and other sources he has provided a wealth of evidence about programming and musical taste at the court. Rice has constructed a picture of the musical forces at her disposal, explored her activities in commissioning new works, and investigated her payments to performers and composers. Fascinating insights into the culture of the court are provided by his chapters on the concerts she arranged in celebration of the Emperor's birthday and name day and on musical caprice—her taste for the comic and the bizarre, with imusual and toy instruments, and musical jokes. There was a great deal of fun about the empress (Rice has obviously fallen in love with her). Though it is difficult to distinguish between conventional sentiments in praise of the empress and genuine affection, it appears that her musicians were devoted to her as a champion of their art. One is tempted to speculate that if Mozart had lived, with his love of play and fantasy he too would have been a faithful believer." William Stafford, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
"Riceova monografie zahrnuje i četné další historické skutečnosti, jež ovšem předkládaná recenze nemůže zaznamenat v plném rozsahu. Množství uváděných bohemikálních souvislostí, které v Riceově knize nacházíme, třebaže toto téma nepatřilo mezi autorovy výzkumné záměry, českého badatele potěší. Zvláštní ocenění zasluhuje vedle rozsahu Riceových rešerší a objevování dosud neznámých hudebních a hudebně-institucionálních souvislostí autorova příkladná preciznost." Milada Jonášová, Hudební věda
"A major contribution to knowledge of musical life in Vienna around the turn of the nineteenth century." Rupert Ridgewell, Newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
This book spins three threads. The first is biographical: a life of Salieri up to the end of his ... more This book spins three threads. The first is biographical: a life of Salieri up to the end of his career as an opera composer in 1804 that relies as much as possible on archival and other primary sources. The second thread is institutional: a study of Viennese operatic organizations within which Salieri's career unfolded, and of the people who shaped them and who worked within them. The third is musico-dramatic: a study of a representative sample of Salieri's operas, amply illustrated with examples of his music. Woven together, these threads produce a biography that can also be read as a history of Viennese opera from the primacy of Gluck in the 1760s to the period in which the operas of Luigi Cherubini and Nicolas Dalayrac (in German translation) triumphed in Vienna, Beethoven wrote the first version of "Fidelio," and Salieri, at the age of fifty-four, gave up the composition of opera.
"This engagingly written, meticulously detailed book on Antonio Salieri's career as an opera composer finally accords Salieri and his operas the serious treatment they deserve." Dorothea Link, Notes (Music Library Association)
"The scope and interest of John A. Rice's book are much wider than its rather dry (but perhaps unavoidable) title suggests: it is, indeed, hard to think of a publication which offers such a vivid evocation of Viennese court and musical life in the late 18th century. Superbly organized, elegantly written and thoughtfully illustrated, . . . this book is an indispensable and highly readable guide to the operatic Vienna which Mozart knew." John Stone, BBC Music Magazine
"As a musical biography devoted to Salieri's operas, detailed, richly contextualized, and historically informed, this volume represents the kind of comprehensive study that, surprisingly, is still not available on Mozart's operas." Jessica Waldoff, JAMS
"This thoroughly researched and handsomely produced volume sets a new standard in studies of late 18th-century Viennese opera." Caryl Clark, Opera Canada
"Rice's many strengths as a historian of music include a vivid historical imagination: the precise circumstances of the creation and production of works are often graphically recreated, with quotations from many different sources, with meticulous attention to the capacities, histories, and popularity of the singers, with connections made to what both Salieri and his audience could have known as they watched a première, and with a large number of beautifully reproduced illustrations, as well as a wealth of musical examples. The colour plates of the costumes from a contemporary Polish production of Axur are quite stunning, and the many pictures of singers help to bring the place and time to life." Mary Hunter, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
Eine Monographie zum musikdramatischen Schaffen Antonio Salieris war lange Zeit ein Desiderat der Opernforschung. Die hier vorliegende Studie liefert nun ein gleichermaßen bewunderungswürdiges wie faszinierendes Ergebnis und schließt eine Lücke in der Wiener Operngeschichte. . . Diese Monographie ist ein 'großer Wurf,' ein Buch, das durch klare Sprache und Darstellung besticht und dem man viele aufmerksame Leser wünscht." Thomas Betzwieser, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
Books (edited) by John A Rice
The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the
last se... more The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the
last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.
This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here.
In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Pendragon, 2004
Contents
Overture: Les Lumières
Opera Buffa
1) Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L'Arcad... more Contents
Overture: Les Lumières
Opera Buffa
1) Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L'Arcadia in Brenta
2) The Creation of the Buffo Finale
3) Goldoni, Opera Buffa, and Mozart's Advent in Vienna
Opera Seria
4) Metastasio, "Maestro dei maestri di cappella drammatici"
5) Hasse, Galuppi, and Metastasio
6) Farinelli and Metastasio: Rival Twins of Public Favor
7) Farinelli Revisited: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
Opéra-comique
8) Terpsichore at the Fair: Old and New Dance Airs in Two Vaudeville Comedies by Lesage
9) Watteau's Italian Comedians
10) The Beggar's Opera and Opéra-comique en vaudevilles
11) Beginnings of the Operatic Romance: Rousseau, Sedaine, and Monsigny
The Querelle des Bouffons
12) Grimm's Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda
13) Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau's Le devin du village
14) Diderot and the Lyric Theater: "The New Style" proposed by Le neveu de Rameau
Reform Opera
15) From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theater and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
16) Traetta in Parma: Ippolito ed Aricia
17) Traetta in Vienna: Armida and Ifigenia in Tauride
18) Orfeo ed Euridice: Some Criticisms, Revisions, and Stage Realizations during Gluck's Lifetime
University of Rochester Press, 2010
Marianna Martines (1744–1813) was one of the most accomplished, prolific and highly honored femal... more Marianna Martines (1744–1813) was one of the most accomplished, prolific and highly honored female musicians of the eighteenth century. She spent most of her life in a remarkable household that included the celebrated librettist Pietro Metastasio, who supervised her education and remained a powerful and supportive mentor. She studied with the young Joseph Haydn, and Vienna knew her as a gifted aristocratic singer and keyboard player who performed for the pleasure of Empress Maria Theresa. The regular private concerts she held in her home attracted the presence and participation of some of Vienna's leading musicians; Mozart enjoyed playing keyboard duets with her. She composed prolifically and in a wide variety of genres, vocal and instrumental, writing church music, oratorios, Italian arias, sonatas, and concertos. Much of that music survives, and those who study it, perform it, and listen to it will be impressed today by its craftsmanship and beauty.
This book, the first volume fully devoted to Martines, examines her life and compositional oeuvre. Based largely on eighteenth-century printed sources, archival documents, and letters (including several by Martines herself, most of them published here for the first time), the book presents a detailed picture of the small but fascinating world in which which she lived and demonstrates the skillfulness and creativity with which she manipulated the conventions of the galant style. Focusing on a limited number of representative works, and using many musical examples, it vividly conveys the nature and extent of her compositional achievement and encourages the future performance of her works.
Papers: Opera Seria and Tragédie Lyrique by John A Rice
Antonio Salieri, Tarare (CD), 2019
Liner notes for the recording of Salieri's Tarare. Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset, cond.... more Liner notes for the recording of Salieri's Tarare. Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset, cond., 2019. In English, with translations into French and German.
Diciottesimo secolo, 2016
Among those who witnessed early performances of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice were Princess Isabelle ... more Among those who witnessed early performances of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice were Princess Isabelle of Parma (in Vienna), Julie de Lespinasse (in Paris), and Countess Sophie Fersen (in Stockholm). Orpheus, and the music Gluck wrote for him, stirred up similar responses in these passionate young women, all of whom found in the protagonist’s tragic plight consolation for own romantic yearning. This paper explores their emotional states, as documented in their letters, and offers some explanations for their identification with a male character from Greek mythology, as brought to life by Gluck’s music and the men who sang it.
This essay is based on a paper I gave at the conference "Gluck and the Map of Eighteenth-Century Europe," organized by Brian Locke at Western Illinois University (Macomb, Illinois, 17–19 October 2014).
This article is part of the book "Mozart's La clemenza di Tito: A Reappraisal," edited by Magnus ... more This article is part of the book "Mozart's La clemenza di Tito: A Reappraisal," edited by Magnus Tessing Schneider and Ruth Tatlow, published in 2018 by Stockholm University Press, and available for download at https://doi.org/10.16993/ban
Italian translation of my article "Sarti's Giulio Sabino, Haydn's Armida, and the Arrival of Oper... more Italian translation of my article "Sarti's Giulio Sabino, Haydn's Armida, and the Arrival of Opera seria at Eszterháza," published in Haydn, ed. Andrea Lanza, Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1999, pp. 157–176.
reading and commenting on a draft of the essay. His corrections, suggestions, and queries have al... more reading and commenting on a draft of the essay. His corrections, suggestions, and queries have allowed me to improve it greatly. 1 For example, in 1780 opere serie were performed in the Italian cities
This paper identified, for the first time, the libretto of Pergolesi's Il prigionier superbo (173... more This paper identified, for the first time, the libretto of Pergolesi's Il prigionier superbo (1733) as an adaptation of Silvani's La fede tradita e vendicata. For a subsequent, more detailed study, see Mario Armellini, "'Il prigionier superbo' di Pergolesi e le sue fonti librettistiche," in Studi Pergolesiani 4 (ed. Francesco Degrada), Iesi, 2000, 253–72.
Graun's Montezuma, first performed in Berlin's Royal Theater in January 1755, is among the finest... more Graun's Montezuma, first performed in Berlin's Royal Theater in January 1755, is among the finest and most interesting of the operas produced under the supervision of Frederick the Great. Neither the first nor the last opera to depict Hernando Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, Montezuma presents a particularly striking interpretation of the events. Frederick’s theater poet Giampietro Tagliazucchi based the libretto on a sketch by the king in French prose, which he in turn based in part on Voltaire's play Alzire and on a Spanish history of the conquest that had been published in French translation. From these sources Frederick derived a dramatic framework onto which he projected his own ideas—especially ideas about religion—and his own family history.
For more on opera at the court of Frederick the Great see Bruno Forment, "Frederick's Athens: Crushing Superstition and Resuscitating the Marvellous at the Königliches Opernhaus, Berlin," Cambridge Opera Journal 24 (2012), 1–42.
Simon Mayr - der bayerische Komponist im europäischen Kontext (Mayr-Studien, 8), pp. 119–135, 2016
Giovanni Simone Mayr's opera Gli sciti (Venice, Carnival 1800) is of interest to historians as th... more Giovanni Simone Mayr's opera Gli sciti (Venice, Carnival 1800) is of interest to historians as the product of the interaction—so typical of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—of Voltaire’s spoken tragedy, ballet, and opera. It also deserves our attention as the product of the confluence of the careers of three remarkable artists: the composer Mayr, the librettist Gaetano Rossi, and the soprano Angelica Catalani.
An eye-witness account of the first Neapolitan production of Gluck's Alceste, translated into Eng... more An eye-witness account of the first Neapolitan production of Gluck's Alceste, translated into English for the first time
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Books by John A Rice
"Music in the Eighteenth Century is an excellent textbook that provides a solid backbone for a class on the Classical period. The textbook will keep students engaged and entertained by moving from one exciting location to another and by exploring how musical works were produced not by geniuses working in a creative vacuum, but rather by people in specific places interacting with specific social, political, and cultural conditions." Martin Nedbal, College Music Symposium
"Students lucky enough to learn from Rice's book will gain a broad, rich, and nuanced view of the eighteenth-century musical world." Margaret Butler, Journal of Music History Pedagogy
"Music in the Eighteenth Century" has been published in Spanish translation by Juan González-Castelao ( Madrid: Akal, 2019); for more information please click on the link above. For a Spanish-language talk-show about the book, with excerpts of music discussed in it, go to https://mediavod-lvlt.rtve.es/resources/TE_SHORAZU/mp3/1/8/1575645796081.mp3
El presente libro propone al lector un absorbente grand tour por los grandes centros musicales de la Europa del siglo XVIII, de Nápoles a Londres, pasando por Berlín, Viena, Praga y San Petersburgo, con una incursión en el Nuevo Mundo colonial.
Con el telón de fondo de una Europa dividida entre un espacio católico y otro protestante, el autor muestra cómo se desarrollaron y mezclaron los estilos «galante» y «culto». Además de considerar en profundidad la obra de Mozart, Haydn y el primer Beethoven, amplía el foco de su análisis para poner de relieve las contribuciones de figuras menos conocidas, pero sin duda relevantes, como Johann Adam Hiller, François-André Philidor o Anna Bon.
Excerpt from a review of the Spanish translation:
"En conjunto, se trata de un acercamiento al siglo XVIII en una discurso muy bien trabajado, pedagógico y metodológicamente acertado que, a pesar de las diferentes lagunas mencionadas, se presenta como uno de los mejores volúmenes de la serie junto con el dedicado a los siglos XX y XXI. La agudeza de su enfoque lo convierte en una lectura que entusiasma en algunos capítulos y resulta altamente enriquecedora en otros, manteniendo los ejes de transversalidad, novedad y abertura hermenéutica bajo los cuales Akal está lanzando esta colección en seis volúmenes." Albert Ferrer Flamarich, Codalario.com
Comments by reviewers:
"'Mozart on the Stage' is essential reading for all who care about eighteenth-century musical theater." Margaret Butler, The Opera Quarterly
"Rice's study must count as the best portrait yet of Mozart as a man of the theatre, sharply and convincingly drawn." Ian Woodfield, Eighteenth-Century Music
"John A. Rice's book provides a superb, engrossing view of the theatrical business in eighteenth-century Germany and Italy, and the ways in which Mozart shaped and was shaped by it." Judith Malafronte, Opera News
"Rice's book deserves unending praise; it should be unreservedly extolled for its fresh approach.... Though Rice is a scholar in his prime, in some ways this study seems almost a culminating one, perhaps because he dedicates it to his long-time mentor, colleague, and friend, Daniel Heartz--among the most prominent of Mozart scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Though Heartz's legacy has undeniably gifted Rice, there is a clue to another of the persistent influences in Rice's extraordinary series of books and articles. Not surprisingly, the frontispiece of 'Mozart on the Stage' is the London portrait of the well known soprano 'La Ferrarese' (Adriana Ferrarese del Bene) who, as a member of the opera buffa troupe at the Burgtheater, sang Susanna in the 1789 revival of 'Le nozze di Figaro' and Fiordiligi in the Viennese premiere of 'Così fan tutte.' Ferrarese has been a key figure in Rice's other books, a catalyst in his research from the very beginning, a cog in the wheel of this web of interactions and intrigues in Vienna." Kay Lipton, Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America
"Affrontare un insieme di tematiche complesse quali quelle legate al rapporto tra Mozart e il teatro in un solo libro – che si ponga come obiettivi sistematici estrema chiarezza, precisione scientifica, uno sguardo complessivo e l’ offerta degli elementi-base necessari per inquadrare l’ opera del salisburghese nel panorama settecentesco a lui contemporaneo – non è certo compito facile, neppure per un decano degli studi specifici quale è John Rice, già docente di storia della musica in quattro differenti università statunitensi e autore di testi considerati fondamentali, a livello internazionale, sull’ argomento.
In ogni caso, la sfida che questo testo si propone, sarà bene dirlo subito, è pienamente vinta (e con merito) dal suo autore, che non solo riesce a fornire i parametri necessari alla comprensione della cultura operistica del tardo XVIII secolo con raro garbo e abilità didattica, ma dà struttura al proprio lavoro in modo sistematico, seppur non pedante, favorendo lo sviluppo nel lettore di una personale valutazione dell’operato di Mozart nel rapporto con le committenze, il pubblico, i collaboratori e le maestranze artistiche durante tutto il percorso di crescita professionale del musicista."
Stefano Aresi, Drammaturgia musicale https://www.iris.unina.it/retrieve/handle/11588/570171/15526/Il%20verismo%20musicale%20italiano.pdf
Table of Contents
1. The Rise and Fall of Peter von Braun and the Temple of Night
The Design and Construction of the Temple of Night
Braun's Financial Ruin and Death and the Collapse of the Temple
2. Visiting the Temple
The Grotto
The Temple of Night
3. The Temple as Garden Folly
Grottoes
Circular Temples
The Temple in the Grotto
"Before us, Truly Everything that Chambers sang of China"
4. The Night between Enlightenment and Romanticism
"And Universal Darkness Buries All"
"How Beautiful Is Night!"
Sophie Mereau's "Schwarzburg"
Night in Hirschfeld's English Garden
The Goddess Night
The Night Sky in Neoclassical Architecture: Boullée, Lequeu, and Hohenberg
A Neoclassical Motif: Alabaster Lamps
5. Mälzel, Salieri, and the Pfeifenwerk
Mechanical Instruments in Gardens
The Viennese Flötenwerk
Mälzel at Schönau
Music for Flötenwerke
Music for Schönau
6. The Temple as Holy Place
Freemasonry and the Temple of Night
Freemasonry and Garden Design
Braun as Imaginary Jacobin
7. The Temple as Theater
Kotzebue in Vienna
Die Zauberflöte, Palmira, and Other Operas
Night on the Viennese Stage
Schinkel's Sets for Die Zauberflöte and Trzechtik's Watercolor
8. The Temple as Kunstgalerie
Mechanical Instruments
Waxworks
Combinations of Waxworks and Music
Braun's Kunstgalerie at Schönau
"John A. Rice's excellent new study of the Empress Marie Therese (1772–1807) makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Vienna's musical culture. . . A highly readable portrait of an appealing and intriguing patron." Mary Sue Morrow, Eighteenth-Century Music
"One cannot help but stand in awe of the scholarship presented in this volume." Caryl Clark, JAMS
"In this consistently engrossing and revealing study, John Rice rescues from obscurity one of the key figures in the musical life of Vienna during a particularly exciting if troubled time. . . Well illustrated visually and with many musical examples, this scholarly and very enjoyable book represents musical publishing at its best." Tim Blanning, Beethoven Forum
"Maria Theresia von Neapel, Kaiserin von Österreich (Lebensdaten: 1772–1807) steht hier erstmals umfassend als Förderin der musikalischen Künste während ihrer Regentschaft mit ihrem Gatten Franz II im Fokus. Aufgrund sorgfältiger Archivrecherchen und etlicher bisher unveröffentlichter Dokumente (z. B. ein eigenes Musiktagebuch) werden Maria Theresias Aktivitäten als Sammlerin, als Musikbevollmächtigte ihres Reiches und auch als praktizierende Musikerin am Hofe genau beschrieben. Haydn, Paer, Paisiello und Beethoven (vor allem mit seinem 'Fidelio') konnten erst unter ihrer Schirm'frau'schaft ihre volle Meisterschaft entfalten."
Ariadne, Newsletter 65: Kunst & Kultur (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
"Marie Therese deserved to be brought out of the shadows; John Rice has done the job admirably." Peter Branscombe, Austrian Studies
"Rice's method is to stay close to the documents that chronicle Marie Therese's musical universe. These include copyists' bills, signed receipts, concert programmes and posters, inventories, catalogues of collections, letters and diaries. He writes with a bibliographer's precision and tenacity, choosing to begin the book with a rather forbidding discussion of the present location and call numbers of works from Marie Therese's vast collections. The book's 100 pages of appendices include Marie Therese's musical diary listing the works performed at court, 1801–03, her correspondence with Paer and Paisiello, and a catalogue of the church music she owned. All items have extensive annotation. This kind of exhaustive research makes the book a definitive guide not only to the music Marie Therese owned but to the performances and performers she sponsored." James J. Johnson, TLS
"Rice's is a model study of an enchanting subject. The rigorous documentary investigation is tempered by the attraction of the Empress's person – capricious indeed, but also deeply engaged in the promotion of contemporary music and the nurture of both professional and amateur talent. Altogether a power for good in the rich musical life of turn-of-the-century Vienna." Patricia Howard, Musical Times.
"Rice' Monographie über "die andere" Maria Theresia besticht durch ihre Fülle an Daten und das umfassende historische Hintergrundwissen; zahlreiche Tabellen und klug ausgewählte Illustrationen machen das Buch trotz der inhaltlichen Dichte übersichtlich und angenehm zu lesen – es wird sicherlich bald zu den "Klassikern" der habsburgischen Musikgeschichte zählten." Elizabeth Thérèse Fritz-Hilscher, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
"John Rice has produced a work of fundamental research for which future scholars
will be grateful. He has reconstructed Marie Therese's dispersed music library and shown how she put it together. He reveals the magnitude of her role in assembling it, as opposed to that of her husband as has usually been assumed. Drawing on her musical diary of 1801-3 (its list of concerts printed as an appendix) and other sources he has provided a wealth of evidence about programming and musical taste at the court. Rice has constructed a picture of the musical forces at her disposal, explored her activities in commissioning new works, and investigated her payments to performers and composers. Fascinating insights into the culture of the court are provided by his chapters on the concerts she arranged in celebration of the Emperor's birthday and name day and on musical caprice—her taste for the comic and the bizarre, with imusual and toy instruments, and musical jokes. There was a great deal of fun about the empress (Rice has obviously fallen in love with her). Though it is difficult to distinguish between conventional sentiments in praise of the empress and genuine affection, it appears that her musicians were devoted to her as a champion of their art. One is tempted to speculate that if Mozart had lived, with his love of play and fantasy he too would have been a faithful believer." William Stafford, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
"Riceova monografie zahrnuje i četné další historické skutečnosti, jež ovšem předkládaná recenze nemůže zaznamenat v plném rozsahu. Množství uváděných bohemikálních souvislostí, které v Riceově knize nacházíme, třebaže toto téma nepatřilo mezi autorovy výzkumné záměry, českého badatele potěší. Zvláštní ocenění zasluhuje vedle rozsahu Riceových rešerší a objevování dosud neznámých hudebních a hudebně-institucionálních souvislostí autorova příkladná preciznost." Milada Jonášová, Hudební věda
"A major contribution to knowledge of musical life in Vienna around the turn of the nineteenth century." Rupert Ridgewell, Newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
"This engagingly written, meticulously detailed book on Antonio Salieri's career as an opera composer finally accords Salieri and his operas the serious treatment they deserve." Dorothea Link, Notes (Music Library Association)
"The scope and interest of John A. Rice's book are much wider than its rather dry (but perhaps unavoidable) title suggests: it is, indeed, hard to think of a publication which offers such a vivid evocation of Viennese court and musical life in the late 18th century. Superbly organized, elegantly written and thoughtfully illustrated, . . . this book is an indispensable and highly readable guide to the operatic Vienna which Mozart knew." John Stone, BBC Music Magazine
"As a musical biography devoted to Salieri's operas, detailed, richly contextualized, and historically informed, this volume represents the kind of comprehensive study that, surprisingly, is still not available on Mozart's operas." Jessica Waldoff, JAMS
"This thoroughly researched and handsomely produced volume sets a new standard in studies of late 18th-century Viennese opera." Caryl Clark, Opera Canada
"Rice's many strengths as a historian of music include a vivid historical imagination: the precise circumstances of the creation and production of works are often graphically recreated, with quotations from many different sources, with meticulous attention to the capacities, histories, and popularity of the singers, with connections made to what both Salieri and his audience could have known as they watched a première, and with a large number of beautifully reproduced illustrations, as well as a wealth of musical examples. The colour plates of the costumes from a contemporary Polish production of Axur are quite stunning, and the many pictures of singers help to bring the place and time to life." Mary Hunter, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
Eine Monographie zum musikdramatischen Schaffen Antonio Salieris war lange Zeit ein Desiderat der Opernforschung. Die hier vorliegende Studie liefert nun ein gleichermaßen bewunderungswürdiges wie faszinierendes Ergebnis und schließt eine Lücke in der Wiener Operngeschichte. . . Diese Monographie ist ein 'großer Wurf,' ein Buch, das durch klare Sprache und Darstellung besticht und dem man viele aufmerksame Leser wünscht." Thomas Betzwieser, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
Books (edited) by John A Rice
last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.
This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here.
In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Overture: Les Lumières
Opera Buffa
1) Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L'Arcadia in Brenta
2) The Creation of the Buffo Finale
3) Goldoni, Opera Buffa, and Mozart's Advent in Vienna
Opera Seria
4) Metastasio, "Maestro dei maestri di cappella drammatici"
5) Hasse, Galuppi, and Metastasio
6) Farinelli and Metastasio: Rival Twins of Public Favor
7) Farinelli Revisited: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
Opéra-comique
8) Terpsichore at the Fair: Old and New Dance Airs in Two Vaudeville Comedies by Lesage
9) Watteau's Italian Comedians
10) The Beggar's Opera and Opéra-comique en vaudevilles
11) Beginnings of the Operatic Romance: Rousseau, Sedaine, and Monsigny
The Querelle des Bouffons
12) Grimm's Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda
13) Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau's Le devin du village
14) Diderot and the Lyric Theater: "The New Style" proposed by Le neveu de Rameau
Reform Opera
15) From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theater and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
16) Traetta in Parma: Ippolito ed Aricia
17) Traetta in Vienna: Armida and Ifigenia in Tauride
18) Orfeo ed Euridice: Some Criticisms, Revisions, and Stage Realizations during Gluck's Lifetime
This book, the first volume fully devoted to Martines, examines her life and compositional oeuvre. Based largely on eighteenth-century printed sources, archival documents, and letters (including several by Martines herself, most of them published here for the first time), the book presents a detailed picture of the small but fascinating world in which which she lived and demonstrates the skillfulness and creativity with which she manipulated the conventions of the galant style. Focusing on a limited number of representative works, and using many musical examples, it vividly conveys the nature and extent of her compositional achievement and encourages the future performance of her works.
Papers: Opera Seria and Tragédie Lyrique by John A Rice
This essay is based on a paper I gave at the conference "Gluck and the Map of Eighteenth-Century Europe," organized by Brian Locke at Western Illinois University (Macomb, Illinois, 17–19 October 2014).
For more on opera at the court of Frederick the Great see Bruno Forment, "Frederick's Athens: Crushing Superstition and Resuscitating the Marvellous at the Königliches Opernhaus, Berlin," Cambridge Opera Journal 24 (2012), 1–42.
"Music in the Eighteenth Century is an excellent textbook that provides a solid backbone for a class on the Classical period. The textbook will keep students engaged and entertained by moving from one exciting location to another and by exploring how musical works were produced not by geniuses working in a creative vacuum, but rather by people in specific places interacting with specific social, political, and cultural conditions." Martin Nedbal, College Music Symposium
"Students lucky enough to learn from Rice's book will gain a broad, rich, and nuanced view of the eighteenth-century musical world." Margaret Butler, Journal of Music History Pedagogy
"Music in the Eighteenth Century" has been published in Spanish translation by Juan González-Castelao ( Madrid: Akal, 2019); for more information please click on the link above. For a Spanish-language talk-show about the book, with excerpts of music discussed in it, go to https://mediavod-lvlt.rtve.es/resources/TE_SHORAZU/mp3/1/8/1575645796081.mp3
El presente libro propone al lector un absorbente grand tour por los grandes centros musicales de la Europa del siglo XVIII, de Nápoles a Londres, pasando por Berlín, Viena, Praga y San Petersburgo, con una incursión en el Nuevo Mundo colonial.
Con el telón de fondo de una Europa dividida entre un espacio católico y otro protestante, el autor muestra cómo se desarrollaron y mezclaron los estilos «galante» y «culto». Además de considerar en profundidad la obra de Mozart, Haydn y el primer Beethoven, amplía el foco de su análisis para poner de relieve las contribuciones de figuras menos conocidas, pero sin duda relevantes, como Johann Adam Hiller, François-André Philidor o Anna Bon.
Excerpt from a review of the Spanish translation:
"En conjunto, se trata de un acercamiento al siglo XVIII en una discurso muy bien trabajado, pedagógico y metodológicamente acertado que, a pesar de las diferentes lagunas mencionadas, se presenta como uno de los mejores volúmenes de la serie junto con el dedicado a los siglos XX y XXI. La agudeza de su enfoque lo convierte en una lectura que entusiasma en algunos capítulos y resulta altamente enriquecedora en otros, manteniendo los ejes de transversalidad, novedad y abertura hermenéutica bajo los cuales Akal está lanzando esta colección en seis volúmenes." Albert Ferrer Flamarich, Codalario.com
Comments by reviewers:
"'Mozart on the Stage' is essential reading for all who care about eighteenth-century musical theater." Margaret Butler, The Opera Quarterly
"Rice's study must count as the best portrait yet of Mozart as a man of the theatre, sharply and convincingly drawn." Ian Woodfield, Eighteenth-Century Music
"John A. Rice's book provides a superb, engrossing view of the theatrical business in eighteenth-century Germany and Italy, and the ways in which Mozart shaped and was shaped by it." Judith Malafronte, Opera News
"Rice's book deserves unending praise; it should be unreservedly extolled for its fresh approach.... Though Rice is a scholar in his prime, in some ways this study seems almost a culminating one, perhaps because he dedicates it to his long-time mentor, colleague, and friend, Daniel Heartz--among the most prominent of Mozart scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Though Heartz's legacy has undeniably gifted Rice, there is a clue to another of the persistent influences in Rice's extraordinary series of books and articles. Not surprisingly, the frontispiece of 'Mozart on the Stage' is the London portrait of the well known soprano 'La Ferrarese' (Adriana Ferrarese del Bene) who, as a member of the opera buffa troupe at the Burgtheater, sang Susanna in the 1789 revival of 'Le nozze di Figaro' and Fiordiligi in the Viennese premiere of 'Così fan tutte.' Ferrarese has been a key figure in Rice's other books, a catalyst in his research from the very beginning, a cog in the wheel of this web of interactions and intrigues in Vienna." Kay Lipton, Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America
"Affrontare un insieme di tematiche complesse quali quelle legate al rapporto tra Mozart e il teatro in un solo libro – che si ponga come obiettivi sistematici estrema chiarezza, precisione scientifica, uno sguardo complessivo e l’ offerta degli elementi-base necessari per inquadrare l’ opera del salisburghese nel panorama settecentesco a lui contemporaneo – non è certo compito facile, neppure per un decano degli studi specifici quale è John Rice, già docente di storia della musica in quattro differenti università statunitensi e autore di testi considerati fondamentali, a livello internazionale, sull’ argomento.
In ogni caso, la sfida che questo testo si propone, sarà bene dirlo subito, è pienamente vinta (e con merito) dal suo autore, che non solo riesce a fornire i parametri necessari alla comprensione della cultura operistica del tardo XVIII secolo con raro garbo e abilità didattica, ma dà struttura al proprio lavoro in modo sistematico, seppur non pedante, favorendo lo sviluppo nel lettore di una personale valutazione dell’operato di Mozart nel rapporto con le committenze, il pubblico, i collaboratori e le maestranze artistiche durante tutto il percorso di crescita professionale del musicista."
Stefano Aresi, Drammaturgia musicale https://www.iris.unina.it/retrieve/handle/11588/570171/15526/Il%20verismo%20musicale%20italiano.pdf
Table of Contents
1. The Rise and Fall of Peter von Braun and the Temple of Night
The Design and Construction of the Temple of Night
Braun's Financial Ruin and Death and the Collapse of the Temple
2. Visiting the Temple
The Grotto
The Temple of Night
3. The Temple as Garden Folly
Grottoes
Circular Temples
The Temple in the Grotto
"Before us, Truly Everything that Chambers sang of China"
4. The Night between Enlightenment and Romanticism
"And Universal Darkness Buries All"
"How Beautiful Is Night!"
Sophie Mereau's "Schwarzburg"
Night in Hirschfeld's English Garden
The Goddess Night
The Night Sky in Neoclassical Architecture: Boullée, Lequeu, and Hohenberg
A Neoclassical Motif: Alabaster Lamps
5. Mälzel, Salieri, and the Pfeifenwerk
Mechanical Instruments in Gardens
The Viennese Flötenwerk
Mälzel at Schönau
Music for Flötenwerke
Music for Schönau
6. The Temple as Holy Place
Freemasonry and the Temple of Night
Freemasonry and Garden Design
Braun as Imaginary Jacobin
7. The Temple as Theater
Kotzebue in Vienna
Die Zauberflöte, Palmira, and Other Operas
Night on the Viennese Stage
Schinkel's Sets for Die Zauberflöte and Trzechtik's Watercolor
8. The Temple as Kunstgalerie
Mechanical Instruments
Waxworks
Combinations of Waxworks and Music
Braun's Kunstgalerie at Schönau
"John A. Rice's excellent new study of the Empress Marie Therese (1772–1807) makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Vienna's musical culture. . . A highly readable portrait of an appealing and intriguing patron." Mary Sue Morrow, Eighteenth-Century Music
"One cannot help but stand in awe of the scholarship presented in this volume." Caryl Clark, JAMS
"In this consistently engrossing and revealing study, John Rice rescues from obscurity one of the key figures in the musical life of Vienna during a particularly exciting if troubled time. . . Well illustrated visually and with many musical examples, this scholarly and very enjoyable book represents musical publishing at its best." Tim Blanning, Beethoven Forum
"Maria Theresia von Neapel, Kaiserin von Österreich (Lebensdaten: 1772–1807) steht hier erstmals umfassend als Förderin der musikalischen Künste während ihrer Regentschaft mit ihrem Gatten Franz II im Fokus. Aufgrund sorgfältiger Archivrecherchen und etlicher bisher unveröffentlichter Dokumente (z. B. ein eigenes Musiktagebuch) werden Maria Theresias Aktivitäten als Sammlerin, als Musikbevollmächtigte ihres Reiches und auch als praktizierende Musikerin am Hofe genau beschrieben. Haydn, Paer, Paisiello und Beethoven (vor allem mit seinem 'Fidelio') konnten erst unter ihrer Schirm'frau'schaft ihre volle Meisterschaft entfalten."
Ariadne, Newsletter 65: Kunst & Kultur (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
"Marie Therese deserved to be brought out of the shadows; John Rice has done the job admirably." Peter Branscombe, Austrian Studies
"Rice's method is to stay close to the documents that chronicle Marie Therese's musical universe. These include copyists' bills, signed receipts, concert programmes and posters, inventories, catalogues of collections, letters and diaries. He writes with a bibliographer's precision and tenacity, choosing to begin the book with a rather forbidding discussion of the present location and call numbers of works from Marie Therese's vast collections. The book's 100 pages of appendices include Marie Therese's musical diary listing the works performed at court, 1801–03, her correspondence with Paer and Paisiello, and a catalogue of the church music she owned. All items have extensive annotation. This kind of exhaustive research makes the book a definitive guide not only to the music Marie Therese owned but to the performances and performers she sponsored." James J. Johnson, TLS
"Rice's is a model study of an enchanting subject. The rigorous documentary investigation is tempered by the attraction of the Empress's person – capricious indeed, but also deeply engaged in the promotion of contemporary music and the nurture of both professional and amateur talent. Altogether a power for good in the rich musical life of turn-of-the-century Vienna." Patricia Howard, Musical Times.
"Rice' Monographie über "die andere" Maria Theresia besticht durch ihre Fülle an Daten und das umfassende historische Hintergrundwissen; zahlreiche Tabellen und klug ausgewählte Illustrationen machen das Buch trotz der inhaltlichen Dichte übersichtlich und angenehm zu lesen – es wird sicherlich bald zu den "Klassikern" der habsburgischen Musikgeschichte zählten." Elizabeth Thérèse Fritz-Hilscher, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
"John Rice has produced a work of fundamental research for which future scholars
will be grateful. He has reconstructed Marie Therese's dispersed music library and shown how she put it together. He reveals the magnitude of her role in assembling it, as opposed to that of her husband as has usually been assumed. Drawing on her musical diary of 1801-3 (its list of concerts printed as an appendix) and other sources he has provided a wealth of evidence about programming and musical taste at the court. Rice has constructed a picture of the musical forces at her disposal, explored her activities in commissioning new works, and investigated her payments to performers and composers. Fascinating insights into the culture of the court are provided by his chapters on the concerts she arranged in celebration of the Emperor's birthday and name day and on musical caprice—her taste for the comic and the bizarre, with imusual and toy instruments, and musical jokes. There was a great deal of fun about the empress (Rice has obviously fallen in love with her). Though it is difficult to distinguish between conventional sentiments in praise of the empress and genuine affection, it appears that her musicians were devoted to her as a champion of their art. One is tempted to speculate that if Mozart had lived, with his love of play and fantasy he too would have been a faithful believer." William Stafford, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
"Riceova monografie zahrnuje i četné další historické skutečnosti, jež ovšem předkládaná recenze nemůže zaznamenat v plném rozsahu. Množství uváděných bohemikálních souvislostí, které v Riceově knize nacházíme, třebaže toto téma nepatřilo mezi autorovy výzkumné záměry, českého badatele potěší. Zvláštní ocenění zasluhuje vedle rozsahu Riceových rešerší a objevování dosud neznámých hudebních a hudebně-institucionálních souvislostí autorova příkladná preciznost." Milada Jonášová, Hudební věda
"A major contribution to knowledge of musical life in Vienna around the turn of the nineteenth century." Rupert Ridgewell, Newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
"This engagingly written, meticulously detailed book on Antonio Salieri's career as an opera composer finally accords Salieri and his operas the serious treatment they deserve." Dorothea Link, Notes (Music Library Association)
"The scope and interest of John A. Rice's book are much wider than its rather dry (but perhaps unavoidable) title suggests: it is, indeed, hard to think of a publication which offers such a vivid evocation of Viennese court and musical life in the late 18th century. Superbly organized, elegantly written and thoughtfully illustrated, . . . this book is an indispensable and highly readable guide to the operatic Vienna which Mozart knew." John Stone, BBC Music Magazine
"As a musical biography devoted to Salieri's operas, detailed, richly contextualized, and historically informed, this volume represents the kind of comprehensive study that, surprisingly, is still not available on Mozart's operas." Jessica Waldoff, JAMS
"This thoroughly researched and handsomely produced volume sets a new standard in studies of late 18th-century Viennese opera." Caryl Clark, Opera Canada
"Rice's many strengths as a historian of music include a vivid historical imagination: the precise circumstances of the creation and production of works are often graphically recreated, with quotations from many different sources, with meticulous attention to the capacities, histories, and popularity of the singers, with connections made to what both Salieri and his audience could have known as they watched a première, and with a large number of beautifully reproduced illustrations, as well as a wealth of musical examples. The colour plates of the costumes from a contemporary Polish production of Axur are quite stunning, and the many pictures of singers help to bring the place and time to life." Mary Hunter, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
Eine Monographie zum musikdramatischen Schaffen Antonio Salieris war lange Zeit ein Desiderat der Opernforschung. Die hier vorliegende Studie liefert nun ein gleichermaßen bewunderungswürdiges wie faszinierendes Ergebnis und schließt eine Lücke in der Wiener Operngeschichte. . . Diese Monographie ist ein 'großer Wurf,' ein Buch, das durch klare Sprache und Darstellung besticht und dem man viele aufmerksame Leser wünscht." Thomas Betzwieser, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift
last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.
This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here.
In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Overture: Les Lumières
Opera Buffa
1) Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L'Arcadia in Brenta
2) The Creation of the Buffo Finale
3) Goldoni, Opera Buffa, and Mozart's Advent in Vienna
Opera Seria
4) Metastasio, "Maestro dei maestri di cappella drammatici"
5) Hasse, Galuppi, and Metastasio
6) Farinelli and Metastasio: Rival Twins of Public Favor
7) Farinelli Revisited: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
Opéra-comique
8) Terpsichore at the Fair: Old and New Dance Airs in Two Vaudeville Comedies by Lesage
9) Watteau's Italian Comedians
10) The Beggar's Opera and Opéra-comique en vaudevilles
11) Beginnings of the Operatic Romance: Rousseau, Sedaine, and Monsigny
The Querelle des Bouffons
12) Grimm's Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda
13) Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau's Le devin du village
14) Diderot and the Lyric Theater: "The New Style" proposed by Le neveu de Rameau
Reform Opera
15) From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theater and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
16) Traetta in Parma: Ippolito ed Aricia
17) Traetta in Vienna: Armida and Ifigenia in Tauride
18) Orfeo ed Euridice: Some Criticisms, Revisions, and Stage Realizations during Gluck's Lifetime
This book, the first volume fully devoted to Martines, examines her life and compositional oeuvre. Based largely on eighteenth-century printed sources, archival documents, and letters (including several by Martines herself, most of them published here for the first time), the book presents a detailed picture of the small but fascinating world in which which she lived and demonstrates the skillfulness and creativity with which she manipulated the conventions of the galant style. Focusing on a limited number of representative works, and using many musical examples, it vividly conveys the nature and extent of her compositional achievement and encourages the future performance of her works.
This essay is based on a paper I gave at the conference "Gluck and the Map of Eighteenth-Century Europe," organized by Brian Locke at Western Illinois University (Macomb, Illinois, 17–19 October 2014).
For more on opera at the court of Frederick the Great see Bruno Forment, "Frederick's Athens: Crushing Superstition and Resuscitating the Marvellous at the Königliches Opernhaus, Berlin," Cambridge Opera Journal 24 (2012), 1–42.
Published in "Mozarts Idomeneo und die Musik in München zur Zeit Karl Theodors, ed. Theodor Göllner and Stephan Hörner, Munich, 2001
In analysing Giulio Sabino as a work that simultaneously follows in the traditions of Metastasian opera seria and embodies modern, neoclassical aesthetics, this essay compares its dramatic situations to those depicted in the history paintings of Jacques-Louis David and his contemporaries and reproduces depictions of Julius Sabinus and his wife Epponina by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Benjamin West.
Giulio Sabino was an immediate and lasting success at Eszterháza, performed no fewer than nineteen times during 1783 and revived in 1784, 1786, and 1787. During the 1780s the Eszterháza troupe performed many more opere serie, including Sarti's Didone abbandonata, Bianchi's Alessandro nelle Indie, and a pasticcio Motezuma. Comic operas continued to be performed. But opera seria was now an essential part of the repertory, as it certainly had not been before the triumph of Giulio Sabino. A repertorial change of direction had occurred, and Giulio Sabino had played a pivital role in that change of direction.
More important still was the effect that Sarti's opera had on Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy's Kapellmeister. On 18 June 1783, less than a month after the first performance of Giulio Sabino at Eszterháza, Joseph Haydn wrote to his publisher Artaria: "P.S. As for the pianoforte sonatas with violin and bass, you must be patient for I am just now composing a new opera seria."
That opera seria was Armida, Haydn's first attempt at the genre. Perhaps he was inspired by the success of Giulio Sabino; perhaps Prince Nicolaus, impressed by Sarti's opera, commanded his composer to try his hand at the same genre. The influence of Giulio Sabino can be sensed in both the choice of the libretto for Haydn's opera in Haydn's music as well.
It is thus fitting that when Sarti visited Eszterháza in 1784 (on his journey to St. Petersburg), he arrived just as a performance of Armida was about to begin. Sarti found a place in the theater, according to Nicholas Etienne Framery:
During the whole first act the beauty of the pieces that followed one another astonished, charmed, enchanted him; he applauded with enthusiasm; but toward the end of the second act he could contain himself no longer. In a sort of delirium he rose and jumped over the benches that separated him from the orchestra, and lept to embrace the astonished maestro. "It's Sarti who embraces you," he cried out. "Sarti, who wanted to see the great Haydn, to admire his beautiful works, but who had no hope of admiring anything so beautiful as this!" The prince, who, from the back of his box, saw the extraordinary and disorderly commotion, but could hear nothing, was alarmed, and shouted, "What is it? What's going on? What's happening?" "It's Giulio Sabino," answered Haydn loudly, seized by the same enthusiasm. "It's the author of that superb music; it's Sarti, who has come to see his good friend Joseph." And these two great men, these two friends, who were seeing each other for the first time, embraced and swore a friendship comparable to the esteem they held for one another.
This article appeared in Haydn Yearbook 15 (1984), 181–98, and, in Italian translation, in Haydn, ed. Andrea Lanza (Bologna, 1999). For further discussion of operatic treatments of Julius Sabinus, with a review of the more recent literature, see Andrea Chegai, “Cherubini autore d'opera italiana: Percorsi di formazione,” in Cherubini al “Cherubini” nel 250o anniversario della nascita, ed Sergio Miceli (Florence, 2011), 19–57, specifically pp. 33–45; on Haydn's Armida, Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (New York, 2009), 334–41; and, on opera seria at Eszterháza, Margaret Butler, "Annährungen an eine Kontextualisierung der Opera seria in Eszterháza: Rückschlüsse aus Turin," in Bearbeitungspraxis in der Oper des späten 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ulrich Konrad (Tutzing, 2007), 103–125.
Zacchiroli, a passionate opera lover, set off the debate by writing to Albergati about his experience at La Scala in Milan during Carnival 1780. The singing of the musico Luigi Marchesi
had overwhelmed him and the rest of the Milanese audience during a performance an aria by Giuseppe Sarti, “Mia speranza io pur vorrei.” In his opening salvo, Zacchiroli vividly conveyed the depth of feelings, the emotional intoxication that opera seria could arouse in eighteenth-century audiences. Albergati responded with an attack on opera seria whose vehemence reflects not only his impatience at what he perceived as the genre’s absurdities, but also the frustration and jealousy felt by a playwright in a country where spoken theater had been opera’s poor cousin since the seventeenth century.
In addition to extensive excerpts from the letters, with commentary, the article presents several assessments of Marchesi’s voice and musicianship by those who witnessed his performances and subjects “Mia speranza”—an early and influential example of the two-tempo rondò—to detailed analysis.
The grand duke and duchess loved music and theater. It was natural that opera should play a crucial role in the festivities with which they were welcomed everywhere. Since the Russian court had established a tradition of hiring the best Italian opera composers—Galuppi, Paisiello—as music directors, young composers such as Cimarosa probably regarded the grand-ducal tour as an opportunity to display their talent, in the hope that they might one day be summoned to Russia.
One of several operas that the Russians heard in Italy was Cimarosa’s Il convito. On 7 April 1782, an audience in Florence that included the Conti del Nord was especially pleased with an ensemble, according to the Gazzetta toscana:
Domenico sera comparvero nel Regio Teatro di via della Pergola insieme con le Loro Altezze Reali ed arciduca Francesco per trovarsi presenti alla rappresentanza di un Dramma ivi per la prima volta esposto in scena, che ha per titolo il Convito messo in musica dal celebre Maestro Cimarosa. Trovasi in esso un bellissimo quartetto di nuova invenzione, che sempre vien fatto replicare tanto ha incontrato il genio della numerosa udienza, ed i finali ancora sono molto stimati.
“Un bellissimo quartetto di nuova invenzione”—the phrase raises several questions. What was this quartet? What was it that the audience in Florence found so beautiful? What does “di nuova invenzione” mean? After an overview of the musical component of the Russians’ grand tour, this paper proposes answers to these questions and considers Cimarosa’s quartet against the background of the tour and of the potential benefits that the composer might have gained from favorably impressing the Conti del Nord.
Although De Gamerra did not claim "La finta scema" as an example of his projected reform of opera buffa, and the title refers openly to Goldoni's "La finta semplice," the work departs significantly from Goldonian norms. It presents an unusually large cast, requiring ten singers. De Gamerra inserted in his libretto many detail instructions for singers' gestures and movements.
In his spoken dramas De Gamerra helped introduce the comédie larmoyante, the sentimental or pathetic comedy, to Italy. In "La finta scema" he experimented with the idea of opera buffa as comédie larmoyante. He was not alone. Several of the most successful operas of the mid 1770s followed Goldoni's "La buona figliuola" in placing a virtuous heroine in a situation in which the audience is asked to pity her; but they intensified her plight, making it much more dangerous and lugubrious than anything experienced by Cecchinia. In Paisiello's "La frascatana" Violante is locked in a tower; in Anfossi's "La vera costanza" the mentally unstable Errico, who has secretly married Rosina, actually instructs another character to murder her. De Gamerra contributed to the increasing level of violence and pathos in opera buffa. In "La finta scema" he emphasized the danger of the situation in which Rosina finds herself almost to the point of tragedy, even bringing her close to being killed by another character.
This essay investigates Salieri's musical response to the mixture of violence, pathos, and comedy in De Gamerra's libretto through a consideration of several arias—"Questa gamba è all'Ercolina," "Quando ascolto il dolce moto," "Questa è un'aria d'Egiziello," and "Questo fioco urlo dolente"—and the finales of acts 1 and 2.
But perhaps Bondarchuk’s use of the Farewell is not quite as anachronistic as it seems. The symphony plays an unexpected role in letters that a Russian nobleman and a French cellist exchanged from 1783 to 1793, as one of several symphonies by Haydn shipped from Paris to Russia. Thus the Farewell may have really been part of the sound-world of the Russian nobility during the Napoleonic era.
Count Nicholas Sheremetev, one of Russia’s richest noblemen, was born in 1751 (thus only a decade or so younger than Tolstoy’s fictional Nicholas Bolkonsky). A youthful visit to Paris in the early 1770s left him passionately fond of French opera, and he devoted much of his life to the production of opera on his estates near Moscow, where his serfs served as singers, instrumentalists, and stagehands. In Paris Nicholas played chamber music with a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra and the Concert Spirituel whom we know only by his last name, Hivart. As Nicholas’s musical ambitions grew, Hivart became his agent and artistic advisor, sending designs for scenery and costumes, theatrical models, printed scores, librettos, and sets of instrumental parts. The letters that accompanied the shipments have long been available in Russian translation (in N. A. Elizarova’s Teatry Sheremetevykh
[Moscow, 1944]). But they have never been published in the original French and are little known outside Russia. The primary value of the Hivart-Sheremetev correspondence lies in what it tells us about how opera was staged in Paris in the 1780s. But this study, based on the letters in the original French (as preserved in the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg), demonstrates their value for students of instrumental music as well. It corroborates other kinds of evidence of the popularity of Haydn’s symphonies in Paris, gives us new information about how Parisian audiences reacted to the Farewell Symphony, and alerts us to the presence in Russia, before 1790, of many of Haydn’s symphonies, including the Farewell.
Hummel's concluding Rondò is puzzling in its structure. It begins conventionally enough with a galloping melody in the tonic followed by contrasting material. The main theme returns, as expected, followed by a second episode labeled "Minore." The trumpet's repeated Bs at mm. 154–55 seem to promise a return to E major and the galloping rondo theme; but contrary to the traditions of rondo form, we never hear the main theme again. Another theme in E major (m. 167) replaces it, dominating the rest of the movement. Hummel borrowed that theme from Luigi Cherubini's Les Deux Journées.
First performed in Paris in 1800, Les Deux Journées reached Vienna just two years later. The Viennese adored this opera, which they could enjoy in two different German translations. The music that Hummel used in his Trumpet Concerto is a march from the finale of act 2, accompanying the voices of soldiers who anticipate the arrest of Count Armand: "Allons, marchons, en diligence! / Observons tous le plus profond silence! / Il est à nous! Il est à nous!" Cherubini presented the march in E major, and Hummel borrowed the key as well as the tune: his decision to write his Trumpet Concerto in the unusual key of E major must have been made in conjunction with his decision to quote Cherubini's melody. Hummel's soloist must have been aware of a peculiarity of Cherubini's opera: it has no trumpet parts. By quoting from Les Deux Journées in the Trumpet Concert, Hummel cleverly gave Weidinger an opportunity to take part in a performance of music from which he was otherwise excluded.
For further discussion of the issues raised, see Rohan Stewart-Macdonald, "The Undiscovered Flight Paths of the "Musical Bee": New Light on Hummel's Musical Quotations," in Eighteenth-Century Music 3 (2006), 7–34; Edward Phillips, Mozartean Gesture and Rhetoric in Hummel's Concerto for Trumpet, DMA dissertation, University of North Texas, 2008; Edward H. Tarr's introduction to the facsimile edition of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto (Vuarmarens, 2012); Bryan Proksch's review of the facsimile edition; and Martin Skamletz, "... und gar nichts, wodurch sich der eigene schöpferische Geist des Komponisten beurkundete": Cherubini, Hummel, Konzerte, Opern, Quodlibets und Trompeten in Wien zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts. Teil 1: Reminiszenzen und ein Zitat," Romantic Brass: Ein Blick zurück ins 19. Jahrhundert, Symposium 1, ed. Claudio Bacciagaluppi and Martin Skamletz (Schliengen, 2015), 40–58.
The full article is in Studi musicali 29 (2000), 453–98.
The PDF of the article is missing p. 469. This missing page is on a separate PDF.
The article is based on a paper presented at the conference "Johann Adolf Hasse in seiner Zeit," Hamburg, 23–26 March 1999, and published in the conference proceedings, ed. Reinhard Wiesend (Stuttgart: Carus-Verlag, 2006), pp. 261–72.
A year after the premiere of Une Folie in Paris, preparations were underway in Vienna for more or less simultaneous productions with translations by Georg Friedrich Treitschke for the Hoftheater (Wagen gewinnt) and by Joseph Seyfried for the Theater an der Wien (Die beyden Füchse). The production at the Hoftheater was ready first, but it was delayed and later withdrawn, while the production in Theater an der Wien enjoyed great success. Indeed, even if Wagen gewinnt had come to the stage as originally scheduled, the Viennese might well have preferred Die beyden Füchse, not only because of the broader comedy of Seyfried’s libretto but also because the cast in the Theater an der Wien included some of Vienna’s best singer-actors.
I gave a shorter version of this paper at the conference "Oper im Aufbruch: Gattungskonzepte des deutschsprachigen Musiktheaters um 1800" (Berlin, 29 September–2 October 2004); it was published in the conference proceedings (with the same title), edited by Marcus Chr. Lippe (Kassel: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 2007).
Versione italiana: Francesco Cotticelli
Additional keywords: Empress Marie Therese, Luigi Marchesi, Carl Weinmüller, Gli Orazi e i Curiazi
Paper presented at the Cimarosa conference in Aversa, 25–27 October 2001 and published in Domenico Cimarosa: un 'napoletano' in Europa, ed. Paologiovanni Maione and Marta Columbro, 2 vols., Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 329–45
soprano who portrayed Susanna in the 1789 revival of Figaro and created the role of
Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte. Ferrarese specialized in the performance of the two-tempo
rondò, and she seems to have insisted that a rondò written especially for her—or one that
she considered suitable for her voice—be inserted into the operas in which she starred.
Her career in Vienna can be traced through a succession of arias in which Vienna's
leading composers explored the conventions of the rondò and the musical and dramatic
possibilities offered by her voice and stage personality. The Bohemian musician Leopold
Kozeluch composed what may have been the last of these arias. For the 1791 revival of his oratorio Moise in Egitto he wrote for Ferrarese the scena "Che veggo! qual timore m'assale," which culminates in the rondò "Caro figlio questo addio." This paper looks briefly
at Kozeluch’s aria and places it within the context of Ferrarese’s cultivation of the two-tempo rondò in Vienna. For those interested in studying or performing Kozeluch's scena, my piano-vocal score can be downloaded here.
This is a much expanded version of a paper entitled “The Schematic World of Mozart’s Figaro,” which I gave at EuroMac Strasbourg on 30 June 2017, as part of the session “Analyzing Mozart’s Operas,”organized by Nathan Martin. I posted it on Academia.edu
on 15 November 2018.
Robert O. Gjerdingen has shown that Mozart, immersed from childhood in the galant musical language, throughout his life wrote music that brilliantly exploited galant schemata. His analyses of several of Mozart’s earliest compositions, as well as of later music such as the slow movement of the Symphony in G minor, K. 550 and the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, are full of valuable insights. However, Gjerdingen left in doubt the applicability of schema theory to one important part of Mozart’s oeuvre. He discussed none of Mozart’s operatic music in depth, and his musical examples include only a single excerpt from Mozart’s later operas. This presentation is something of an experiment, to see how useful Gjerdingen’s analytical system is in confronting late eighteenth-century opera. For this experiment, I’ll focus on the wonderfully complex and dramatic quartet from Idomeneo, “Andrò ramingo e solo.” First I will introduce some of the voice-leading schemata that Mozart used in the quartet, and then we will look at the quartet itself, and see how Mozart’s use of schemata contributed to its dramatic effect.
A glance at the score reveals how intensively Mozart interacted with the conventional patterns described by Gjerdingen and others. Hardly a measure in the quartet does not involve at least one of these schemata.
Mozart identified some schemata with certain characters. The Triadic Descent at the beginning of the prima parte and at the beginning and end of the seconda parte is clearly associated with Idamante. When Ilia enters for the first time, she is accompanied by two new schemata, the Meyer and the Indugio. When Idomeneo enters, we hear another new schema, the Passo Indietro.
Some of these schemata don’t play important roles later in the quartet. The Morte, on the other hand, can be heard as dominating the quartet as a whole. (The Morte combines the old chromatic descending tetrachord--the "passus duriusculus"--in the bass with a rising chromatic line in the treble; see “The Morte: A Galant Voice-Leading Schema as Emblem of Lament and Compositional Building-Block,” Eighteenth-Century Music 12 (2015), 157–81). At the beginning, where we hear the Morte so clearly in the orchestral introduction and in Idamante’s first utterance, it characterizes the young hero’s emotional state. But as the quartet unfolds, it takes on a wider meaning: it begins to apply to all four characters. It accompanies Elettra’s first words, “Quando vendetta avrò?” In the seconda parte the Morte plays a role in a remarkable passage in which Idomeneo cries out repeatedly “Nettun spietato” as the music sinks ominously through a series of tonally remote minor keys. The most spectacular way in which the Morte dominates the quartet was pointed out many years ago by Daniel Heartz (“The Great Quartet in Mozart’s Idomeneo,” Music Forum 5 (1980), 233–56). Two amazing tonal digressions—the passage in D flat major near the end of the prima parte and the passage in C flat major near the end of the seconda parte, can be heard as a composing out of the two chromatic notes in the Morte bass in E flat.
These tonal shifts are wild indeed, but in one respect the passages in D flat and C flat are actually very conventional. They both use the Overture, a beloved schema with which Mozart’s listeners were familiar. (As named by Dean Sutcliffe, the Overture involves an ascending scale or scale segment over a pedal point.) Their familiarity with the schema must have helped them accept the extraordinary tonal challenges with which Mozart confronted them.
Mozart, working within a binary structure, used many of the same schemata in the prima parte and the seconda parte. But he also departed from the expected parallelism of binary form, most remarkably and dramatically toward the end of the seconda parte, where he introduced a large number of schemata that he had not previously used in the quartet. Starting at m. 134: the Monte Romanesca, the Long Comma, the Aprile, the Corelli Leapfrog, and finally, in the orchestral postlude, the Quiescenza and the Heartz.
Two of these schemata, the Monte Romanesca and the Corelli Leapfrog, must have sounded old-fashioned to Mozart’s audience, and more appropriate to sacred music than to opera. Introducing them here at the climax of the quartet, Mozart momentarily brought his audience from the theater into the church: he used antiquated musical vocabulary to transform an operatic conflict into an elemental confrontation of human beings and powers beyond their control.
The appearance of all of these new schemata coincides exactly with the return of the tonic E flat major after so much tonal and modal instability. The re-establishment of the tonic key and the major mode encouraged Mozart to take his exploration of schemata to a new level of variety and expressiveness. Measure 134 signals the end of an astonishing tonal adventure; but it constitutes just the beginning of a final, climactic display of schematic fireworks.
Robert Gjerdingen’s book Music in the Galant Style (2007) has done much to influence the way we hear, think about, and talk about eighteenth-century music. Gjerdingen drew his musical examples from a wide variety of genres, but one kind of music that is noticeably absent from his book is late eighteenth-century opera buffa. Although his sample of early galant music—the music of the 1730s through the 1760s—includes a lot of operatic music, the music of the 1780s is for Gjerdingen almost exclusively instrumental, even when he considers such predominantly operatic composers as Salieri and Cimarosa. Gjerdingen’s work has had important repercussions in the analysis of instrumental music by other scholars, such as Vasili Byros, William Caplin, Roman Ivanovitch, and Markus Neuwirth; but few attempts have been made, as far as I know, to apply Gjerdingen’s analytical framework to opera buffa. This arouses our curiosity about the usefulness of schema theory in the study of operas by Mozart and his contemporaries.
This presentation offers a small preliminary step toward the application of schema theory to opera buffa. Giovanni Paisiello manipulated galant schemata with remarkable élan. Both for that reason and because this year we are commemorating the 200th anniversary of Paisiello’s death, I will focus on his music. Il barbiere di Siviglia offers us an attractive case study, not only because of its considerable charm but also because of its influence on the composer who wrote its sequel, Le nozze di Figaro.
You can hear recordings of some of these (and many other) examples of the Heartz on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRR8OLIxtGk
Seventy-six years later, Beethoven published his Thirty-two Variations on a theme in C minor, WoO 80 (1806). The theme begins by rising chromatically from 1 to 5 over a bass that descends chromatically from 1 to 5; treble and bass reach the octave by way of a climactic augmented sixth, at which point they diverge one more step in each direction.
Despite the different contexts in which Hasse and Beethoven used these chromatic themes, and the different purposes to which they put them, both passages represent a single voice-leading schema analogous to those introduced by Robert Gjerdingen. Following Gjerdingen’s use of Italian words to refer to some of his schemata, I propose the word “Morte” for this schema and survey its use by eighteenth-century musicians, who relied on it not only as an intensely expressive gesture that could effectively enhance the most tragic moments of a work but also as a compositional building block: an ornate half cadence that they found especially useful in development sections.
For a Youtube compilation of recorded examples, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4vhH7zJziw
For musical examples and links to performances, see Handout, also posted on Academia.edu
Hungarian translation in Magyar Zene 58 (2019): https://mzzt.hu/images/magyarzene/mz_2019_3.pdf
Keywords: lament, omnibus progression, chromatic wedge, passacaglia progression, circle-of-fifths Prinner, Ponte, Le-Sol-Fi-Sol, Fonte
favorite phrases, as an opening gambit: both he and other scholars should feel free to
change his list of voice-leading schemata (which I call his schematicon, by analogy with
the word lexicon) as our knowledge of the music they describe changes. In this paper,
part of a larger project to expand the schematicon, I discuss a schema that Jean-Baptiste Lully used at the beginning of several overtures, including Georges Dandin (1668), Thésée (1674), and Roland (1685). It unfolds in four stages. Stage 1: the bass
on scale degree 1, the melody on 1, 3, or 5. Stage 2: while the bass on 1 is sustained, the
melody moves to 4 or 2, creating a dissonance. Stage 3: the dissonance is resolved when
the bass descends from 1 to 7. Stage 4: the melody proceeds to 3 or 1 while the bass
returns to 1. Throughout the eighteenth century composers used this schema, which I
propose we name after the composer who demonstrated it so often and effectively. No
one used it more brilliantly than Mozart, who deployed it on a massive scale at the
beginning of the Piano Concerto in C, K. 503. Even in the last year of his life, in
La clemenza di Tito, Mozart turned to the Lully to evoke the grandeur and splendor of
absolute monarchy.
For a Youtube compilation of examples of the Lully, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqDR4hkszoY
The Lully was among the many galant schemata imported to the New World and used by composers in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. For some early nineteenth-century Brazilian examples, see Guilherme Aleixo da Silva Monteiro, "Análise das schematae galantes nos seis responsórios fúnebres de João de Deus de Castro Lobo (1794–1832)," Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, 2017.
To hear some examples of the Heartz, go to this compilation on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRR8OLIxtGk
For further examples of the Heartz in the operas of Jommelli and his predecessors, see Bruno Forment's excellent article "Jommelli's 'tenacious memory': Replications in L'Ifigenìa (1751)," Studi musicali 38 (2009), 361–87; also accessible on academia.edu at
https://www.academia.edu/8343485/Jommelli_s_tenacious_memory_replications_in_L_Ifigenìa_1751_
The Heartz was among the many galant schemata imported to the New World and used by composers in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. For some early nineteenth-century Brazilian examples, see Mítia Ganade D'Acol, "Decoro musical e esquemas galantes: um estudo de caso das seções de canto solo das Missas de Requiem de José Maurício Nunes Garcia e Marcos Portugal," Universidade de São Paulo, 2015, online at http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/27/27157/tde-23032017-153229/es.php and Guilherme Aleixo da Silva Monteiro, "Análise das schematae galantes nos seis responsórios fúnebres de João de Deus de Castro Lobo (1794–1832)," Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, 2017, online at http://repositorioinstitucional.uea.edu.br/bitstream/riuea/851/1/An%C3%A1lise%20das%20schematae%20galantes%20nos%20seis%20respons%C3%B3rios%20f%C3%BAnebres%20de%20jo%C3%A3o%20de%20deus%20de%20castro%20lobo%201794-1832.pdf
a lyre and a laurel wreath, is well known to historians
of 18th-century Italian portraiture. It exists in two autograph versions and several 18th-century copies, and has been exhibited and reproduced often. It has attracted attention not only for its beauty and for the amazing accomplishments and talents of its teenage subject, but also because Batoni (familiar today primarily as a painter of Britons on the Grand
Tour) made few portraits of Italian women. The
many scholars who have commented on the portrait
have said little about the prominent role of musical
instruments or about the manuscript that rests conspicuously on the music stand, as if inviting viewers
to peruse it. The recent identification of the music, its composer and its librettist enhances our understanding
of the painting’s programme, which documents Giacinta’s place in Rome’s Arcadian Academy and her status as a member of one of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful families.
PDF available on request
Frizzi briefly considered operatic composers and provided a useful discussion of the different kinds of roles in opera buffa (mezzo carattere, buffo caricato, etc.). But his primary interest was in singers: his letters constitute a source of information about some of the leading singers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Gasparo Pacchierotti, Luigi Marchesi, Luisa Todi, Brigida Banti, Elizabeth Billington, Elisabeth Mara, Franziska Danzi Lebrun, Giuseppina Grassini, Angelica Catalani, Anna Morichelli, Giovanni Ansani, Matteo Babbini, Giacomo David, Stefano Mandini, Teresa Strinasacchi, and Giovanni Battista Brocchi.
This article, which presents Frizzi's letters on contemporary opera with an introduction, annotations, and an index of names, appeared in Studi musicali 28 (1994), 367–93. For further discussion of Frizzi's comments on types of operatic roles, see Daniel Brandenburg, "Benedetto Frizzis 'Dissertazione di biografia musicale' (Triest 1802). Eine Quelle zur Rollencharakteristik in der Opera Buffa," in Bühnenklänge. Festschrift für Sieghart Döhring zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Betzwieser, Daniel Brandenburg et al., Munich, 2005, 37–45. For more on Frizzi, see Benedetto Frizzi: Un illuminista ebreo nell'età dell'emancipazione, ed. Marida Brignani e Maurizio Bertolotti, Florence, 2009.
Elsewhere I have published lists of performers who took part in two of the Handel performances in Florence: https://www.academia.edu/7023440/Grand_Duke_Pietro_Leopoldos_Musical_Patronage_in_Florence_1765-1790_as_Reflected_in_the_Ricasoli_Collection
""
Hadrava's letters to his friend Johann Paul Schulthesius (published, with Italian translation, by Giuliana Gialdroni) represent an important source of information about musical life in Naples during the 1780s and about Hadrava's activities, including his piano-importing business. From this point of view the most valuable letter, written in 1789, largely concerns a vis-à-vis piano-harpsichord by Stein that Hadrava had helped a Neapolitan nobleman to obtain. It contains descriptions not only of the instrument but also of a recital in which Hadrava played it, first by himself and then together with Giovanni Paisiello. This letter is of special interest to historians of the piano because one of two surviving vis-à-vis instruments by Stein is preserved today in Naples. That instrument may well be the one described by Hadrava in 1789.
This is the slide show that accompanied my talk in the conference "Galant Schemata in Theory and Practice," September 30–October 2, 2022
lightest, most purely comic drama. This presentation will begin with a brief summary of Bouilly’s libretto – a retelling of the old story in which a handsome young man overcomes obstacles separating him from a charming young woman, guarded by an aged ward who wants to marry her himself – and a survey of some of the score’s musical highlights. I will present some early nineteenth-century costume designs, a fan depicting characters from the opera, and Gustaf Nyblaeus’s watercolor of a production of Une Folie in Stockholm as evidence of how it might have been staged in Paris.
After a few remarks about the opera’s reception in Paris the scene will shift to Vienna, and the translations of Bouilly’s libretto for the Theater an der Wien
(Die beyden Füchse by Seyfried) and the Hoftheater
(Wagen gewinnt by Treitschke). Although Wagen gewinnt
was ready first, the libretto printed, and the premiere
announced for May 12, 1803, the illness of one of the singers and the subsequent death of another led to the production being cancelled. Less than two weeks later,
on May 24, Die beyden Füchse triumphed in the Theater an der Wien. Indeed, even if Wagen gewinnt had come to the stage, the Viennese might well have preferred Die
beyden Füchse, not only because of Seyfried’s libretto (which effectively transformed the Picardy dialect spoken by a young man from the country –a major source of
comedy in Bouilly’s libretto – into Swabian dialect) but also because the cast in the Theater an der Wien included some of Vienna’s best singer-actors.
Inseparable from the success of Une Folie – in Vienna and elsewhere –was the popularity of the romance "Je suis encore dans mon printemps“ (in Seyfried’s
version, "In des Tyrannen Eisenmacht“). I will speculate on just what made this music so popular, surveying some of the forms – sets of variations, appearances in quodlibets and potpourris, and insertion in other operas – in which Méhul’s romance pervaded Europe’s musical culture during the early nineteenth century.
Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of the young noblewoman Giacinta Orsini, leaning on a harpsichord and holding a lyre, is well known to historians of eighteenth-century Italian portraiture. It has been exhibited and reproduced often, attracting attention not only for its beauty and for the teenage subject’s amazing accomplishments and talents, but also because of Batoni (known today primarily as a painter of Englishmen on the Grand Tour) made few portraits of Italian women. The scholars who have commented on the portrait have said little about the prominent role of musical instruments and about the manuscript that rests conspicuously on the music stand, as if inviting the viewer to peruse it.
I have confirmed Saverio Franchi's hypothesis that the music is by Antonio Aurisicchio, virtuoso in the service of Cardinal Domenico Orsini, Giacinta’s father. The cantata, which survives in at least two manuscripts, is a substantial work for soprano and orchestra consisting of an overture, two obbligato recitatives and two arias. The manuscripts do not name the author of the text or explain its purpose. The author (as the Batoni scholars Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Kerber revealed about a decade ago) was Giacinta herself; she addressed this componimento per musica to her father, who was about to set out on a long voyage
The identification of Giacinta and Aurisicchio as co-creators of the music in Batoni’s portrait, and the discovery that it served as an expression of a daughter’s affection for her father, enhance our understanding of the painting’s complex program, which documents Giacinta’s roles within the Arcadian Academy and within one of Rome’s wealthiest and most powerful families.
This paper has now (October 2018) appeared in "Early Music." PDF available on request.
Eighteenth-Century Composers in Search of the Sublime
Paper presented at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University, on 1 December 2016 and at the Department of Music, Princeton University, on 3 April 2017
An expanded version of the paper, with musical examples and links to performances, available elsewhere on Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/32429345/Climbing_Monte_Romanesca_Eighteenth-Century_Composers_in_Search_of_the_Sublime
The voice-leading schema that Robert O. Gjerdingen calls the Monte Romanesca served composers for more than a hundred years as the framework for passages that move and delight listeners still today. After differentiating the Monte Romanesca from the rising-fifths sequence (the larger category to which it belongs), I will present a history of the schema from Corelli to Mozart and Haydn. I will show that composers tended to save it for special effect, using it late in movements, where it serves a climactic, pre-cadential function. Inspired by the work of Vasili Byros on the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol and Olga Sanchez on the Romanesca/Hymn topic, I will reconstruct a network of meanings that composers might have wanted to convey with their use of the schema. Especially common in sacred music, the Monte Romanesca (like the Le-Sol-Fi-Sol and the Romanesca/Hymn) carried a sacred aura when used in secular music. I will present a brief overview of the sublime as an aesthetic category, arguing that composers of music both sacred and secular, both instrumental and vocal, used the Monte Romanesca as a signifier of the sublime.
To hear some examples of the Monte Romanesca, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJRhWUbgsTo
The grand duke and duchess loved music and theater. It was natural that opera should play a crucial role in the festivities with which they were welcomed everywhere. Since the Russian court had established a tradition of hiring the best Italian opera composers—Galuppi, Paisiello—as music directors, young composers such as Cimarosa probably regarded the grand-ducal tour as an opportunity to display their talent, in the hope that they might one day be summoned to Russia.
One of several operas that the Russians heard in Italy was Cimarosa’s Il convito. On 7 April 1782, an audience in Florence that included the Conti del Nord was especially pleased with an ensemble, according to the Gazzetta toscana:
Domenico sera comparvero nel Regio Teatro di via della Pergola insieme con le Loro Altezze Reali ed arciduca Francesco per trovarsi presenti alla rappresentanza di un Dramma ivi per la prima volta esposto in scena, che ha per titolo il Convito messo in musica dal celebre Maestro Cimarosa. Trovasi in esso un bellissimo quartetto di nuova invenzione, che sempre vien fatto replicare tanto ha incontrato il genio della numerosa udienza, ed i finali ancora sono molto stimati.
“Un bellissimo quartetto di nuova invenzione”—the phrase raises several questions. What was this quartet? What was it that the audience in Florence found so beautiful? What does “di nuova invenzione” mean? After an overview of the musical component of the Russians’ grand tour, this paper proposes answers to these questions and considers Cimarosa’s quartet against the background of the tour and of the potential benefits that the composer might have gained from favorably impressing the Conti del Nord.
In addition to composing opere serie for Carnival performances in Munich’s splendid Cuvilliés-Theater (where Idomeneo was first performed in 1781), Bernasconi
also wrote much sacred music: the court chapel’s inventory lists 34 Masses, 35 Vespers, 9 settings of the Miserere, and many other works. Most of this music was lost in the destruction of the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche in 1944.
Only one of Bernasconi’s Munich Misereres survives, in copies made for churches outside of Munich: a fifteen-movement work in D minor for chorus, soloists, and
orchestra. Christoph Riedo’s recently published edition
https://unifr.academia.edu/ChristophRiedo
and a performance by I Barocchisti under Diego Fasolis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLS57Xg_YLE
have introduced to historians of eighteenth-century music a large-scale sacred work of outstanding quality.
This joint presentation will begin with a discussion of the Miserere within the context of liturgical practices at the Munich court, its re-use of music from Bernasconi's earlier Venetian period, its transmission in sources in Passau and Beromünster (Switzerland), and its publication in the series "Music from the Monasteries in Switzerland." It will continue with an analysis, illustrated with musical examples, of the Miserere. Demonstrating the effectiveness of Bernasconi’s tonal plan, his choice of meters and tempos, his alternation of learned and galant styles, and his use of galant voice-leading schemata, it will place the Miserere within a tradition of
tragic sacred music that extends from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater to Mozart’s Requiem
Prince Anton came to regret his destruction of the operatic establishment and Haydn’s absence when making plans for the celebration of his installation as sheriff of Sopron county, which took place at Eszterháza on 3 and 4 August 1791. For the operatic component of the festivities, Anton was forced to turn to the Viennese court for both composer and singers. Joseph Weigl, Salieri’s assistant at the court theater, set to music a libretto by Giovanni Battista Casti. Four soloists from the Viennese troupe presented Venere e Adone as part of evening entertainments that also included fireworks and balls.
Although the libretto published for the performances at Eszterháza calls Venere e Adone a cantata, it closely resembles works performed under the rubric of festa or azione teatrale, typical features of which are brevity, a small cast, an important role for chorus, a plot based on Greek mythology, and a celebratory function. Venere e Adone, elaborately staged, turned out to be the last musical drama performed at Eszterháza. During the two-day celebration to which it contributed, the great palace recaptured one last time the splendor with which Prince Nicolaus had endowed it.
performance of Gluck’s Orpheus och Euridice in Stockholm in 1777. She was writing to
Prince Alexander Kurakin, with whom she had been involved in a brief and passionate
love affair, despite her engagement to a Swedish nobleman. Kurakin had left Stockholm
for St. Petersburg a few weeks earlier. After receiving no letters from him since his
departure, she feared (correctly) that he intended to break off the relationship.
Countess Fersen was not the only young woman with a broken heart who found
romantic consolation in Gluck’s Orpheus. Already during the first run of performances in
1762, Princess Isabella of Parma, recently married to Archduke Joseph (soon to be
Emperor Joseph II) wrote mournfully to her sister-in-law Maria Christina, whose
company she much preferred to Joseph’s. She identified herself with Orpheus as a way of
expressing the depth and hopelessness of her love. And shortly after the premiere of the
Paris version in 1774, Julie de Lespinasse wrote to her beloved Comte de Guibert, who
was far from Paris, that she found a mixture of pain and pleasure in Gluck’s opera: “Je
voudrois entendre dix foix par jour cet air qui me déchire, et qui me fait jouir de tout
ce que je regrette: j’ai perdu mon Eurydice, etc.”
The operatic character whose plight consoled these women was not a woman who
had lost her lover, but a man who had lost his wife. The singers who portrayed him
differed greatly: in Vienna a contralto musico sang in Italian; in Paris an haute-contre
sang in French, in Stockholm a tenor sang in Swedish. Yet all three singers managed to
stir up similar responses in young female members of their audience. In this paper I will
explore the emotional states of these women (as documented in their letters) and offer
some explanations for their identification with a male character from Greek mythology,
as brought to life by Gluck’s music and the men who sang it.
The Descending 5–6 Sequence is closely related to the Leaping or Pachelbel Romanesca, but it replaces that schema's succession of root position chords with an alternation of root position and first inversion chords. The bass, like that of the Pachelbel, starts on 1, but instead of Pachelbel's down-a-fourth, up-a-second zig-zag, it descends by step. See Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style, pp. 31–32.
The Descending 5–6 Sequence continued to fascinate musicians in the twentieth century. Listen, for example, to Carlos Gardel's "Por una cabeza" (1935), as sung by the composer himself: https://youtu.be/SJ1aTPM-dyE
Many of these settings of the Stabat Mater existed only in manuscripts in the court chapel, where they were destroyed during the Allied bombing of Munich on the night of 24–25 April 1944. The Stabat Mater in G minor was one of Bernasconi's few sacred works to survive the bombing, preserved in a set of parts (the source of this edition) in the great music library of Archduke Maximilian Franz, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. It is pleasing to imagine the young Beethoven playing this music during his stint as a violist in the archbishop's orchestra.
Most of these passages are presented in musical notation and discussed in my article "Climbing Monte Romanesca: Eighteenth-Century Composers in Search of the Sublime": https://www.academia.edu/32429345/Climbing_Monte_Romanesca_Eighteenth-Century_Composers_in_Search_of_the_Sublime
This time I consider the role that the Meyer plays in the sentence, a musical structure ubiquitous in music of the second half of the eighteenth century. For a brief explanation of the sentence, with links to other online resources, see the commentary accompanying my video “Musical Sentences that begin with the Triadic Ascent”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb9pr86Vvns
Robert Gjerdingen named the Meyer after his mentor Leonard Meyer, who called attention to the frequent use of this voice-leading schema in themes that William Caplin would later call “sentences”; see Meyer’s seminal article “Exploiting Limits: Creation, Archetypes and Style Change,” in Daedulus III (1980), 177–205. Janet Schmalfeldt explored the implications of Meyer’s insight (with reference to the early work of Caplin and Gjerdingen) in her article “Towards a Reconciliation of Schenkerian Concepts with Traditional and Recent Theories of Form” in Music Analysis 10 (1991) 233–87 (see especially pp. 243–46).
The Meyer typically unfolds in two dyads: 1–7 followed by 4–3. In composing sentences, eighteenth-century composers found these dyads an effective framework for the two-fold deployment of the basic idea. The authors of Open Music Theory describe the Meyer as
an "archetypal 'opening' schema in the galant style" that "works well at the beginning of a theme."
Occasionally composers used the Meyer twice in the presentation phrase, with the basic idea consisting of the whole schema.
This video presents a compilation of examples of the Meyer at the beginning of sentences in instrumental and vocal music by Mozart, Paisiello, Haydn, Abel, Beethoven, Salieri, Vanhal, Platti, Gluck, Pescetti, Vinci, Benda, and Dittersdorf.
Other examples of musical sentences that begin with a Meyer include "Batti, batti, o bel Masetto," in Mozart's Don Giovanni: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ty3UIw77jI
This is the second part of a three-part video on the Mozartian Loop. It contains some examples of longer loops, with modules of five or more measures, by Carl Friedrich Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Giovanni Paisiello, Wenzel Pichl, Antonio Salieri, Domenico Scarlatti, and Carl Stamitz.
Other examples of longer Mozartian Loops include the opening vocal line in the finale of act 2 of Mozart's Don Giovanni (at the words "Già la mensa è preparata"): https://youtu.be/l-j8EtweQzs?t=22s
The libretto of Venere e Adone calls itself a cantata; the composer himself, in his memoirs, referred to Venere e Adone as “eine grosse Cantate.” But in both text and music it conforms closely to the subspecies of Italian serious opera known as the azione teatrale or festa teatrale—typical features of which are brevity, a small cast, an important role for chorus, a plot based on Greek mythology, and a celebratory function.
Preview on Google Books; click on link below
The essay investigates from an exclusively musical point of view the real reforming elements introduced by Tommaso Traetta into the works conceived between 1759 and 1763 - and particularly in Armida (1761) and Ifigenia in Tauride (1763), both of which were intended for the Viennese court - in agreement with the various men of letters with whom he cooperated.
2. GERHARD CROLL
Alceste, a reforming drama written by Calzabigi and Gluck, has almost certainly never been performed in its original form. The handwritten score used by Gluck and Salieri proves Salieri conducting this opera until 1810. Every new production inluded various bigger and smaller versions (performances in Vienna 1767/68, 1781, 1783, 1810). In 1767 Salieri accompanied the orchestra on the 2nd harpsicord, in 1770 he acted as a substitute for Gluck at the rehearsals and was then resposible for the new productions until 1810 (new closing of the first act).Corrections, additions, changes in the instrumentation and deletions were made by him - when exactly they were made cannot be determined until now.
3. MARINA MAYRHOFER
The paper addresses the problem of the genesis of Armida, “dramma per musica “, in three acts, librettist Marco Coltellini, with Salieri debuted in the genre of opera seria, on the second of June 1771, in Viennese Burgtheater. In the second part of essay, the opera score is analyzed to highlight the more experimental aspects of drama
4. MARITA PETZOLDT MCCLYMONDS
Salieri composed mainly opera buffa or genres that mixed comic and serious elements. His few ventures into strictly serious opera are scattered throughout the first two decades of his career. They furthered efforts at rapprochement between French and Italian taste taking place in Italian opera seria during the third quarter of the century especially in German-speaking lands.
5. ELENA BIGGI PARODI
Salieri explained the intention of many of his Overtures with personally written notes, which were additions to many of his scores that were written in his own hand. In the Overtures the composer purposely mixes the styles together, using them as manifests for the varieties of genres that his compositions belong to. Many of his Overtures illustrate an action, sometimes only imagined through the music and others created on the stage. In all events, for Salieri, they are the ideal place to experiment his interest in the relationship between music and gesture, as well as the new genre of pantomime dance, and in particular his attention to depict action and movement with music. An emblematic example of the convergence of genres is the use of Sinfonia di introduzione from Europa riconosciuta (Milan, 1778) for Cesare in Farmacusa (Vienna, 1800).
6. ELISA GROSSATO
On 8th June 1773, the comic drama for music La Locandiera by Antonio Salieri was staged for the first time with great success at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The libretto for the La Locandiera was freely taken from Goldoni’s piéce, and written by the Italian tenor Domenico Poggi as his first work as librettist. A well-known artist, Poggi stood out for his role as the oracle in the premiere in Vienna of Alceste by Gluck, and, through his marriage to Clementina Baglioni, he became part of one of the most prestigious families of singers at that time. With his debut as librettist Poggi simplified and slightly emptied the text of La Locandiera, but the libretto he gave to Salieri was still very pleasant, graceful and, above all, functional in outlining the different characters, especially through the arias they all sing in varying quantities, depending on their importance within the opera.
7. JOHN RICE
Salieri's La secchia rapita is based on the mock-epic poem of the same name by the late Renaissance poet Alessandro Tassoni, who called his work a «poema eroicomico». The poem tells of a war between the neighboring cities of Modena and Bologna in 1325, during which the Modenese army, having invaded Bologna, stole a wooden bucket as symbol of its victory. The comedy in Tassoni's poem, which comes largely from its clever parody of the literary devices of epic poetry, appealed to eighteenth-century taste.
8. RUDOLPH ANGERMUELLER
Cublai, gran Kan de'Tartari, completed in 1788 by Salieri, was never performed at the time.
The first part of this article shows the reasons for this:
It was the satire about the Russian court and not musical deficiencies.
Casti is attacking the stituation in czarist Russia, but also the Austrian alliances with Turkey (war agains the Turks 1788) and the censorship of the theater in Vienna at the time.
9. RUDOLPH ANGERMUELLER
The debut performance of Salieri’s Dramma per musica Annibale was held at the Teatro Nuovo in Trieste on May 19th, 1801.This article decribes the sources for the music as well as the text, the singers of the debut performance (Marchesi, David, Gaetano Bianchi, Radicati, Angela Bianchi - who stood at the forefront at the time) and the résumé of the librettist Sografi. Annibale is now seen as a big set-back in Salieri’s opera productions, as he made certain concessions to the singers and the audience
10 . FRANCESCO BLANCHETTI
Antonio Salieri's comic opera La grotta di Trofonio, based on a libretto by Giambattista Casti, received its première in Vienna on 12 October 1785. A few months later the libretto, heavily revised by Giuseppe Palomba, was set to music by Giovanni Paisiello and staged in Naples (December 1785). Even if the subject is the same, the two librettos are very different. Topics of various nature are introduced into the libretto by Casti: a mockery of erudition (a traditional theme in opera buffa); an illuministic criticism of magic and superstition; satiric hints, in a Voltairian spirit, against philosophical optimism.
11. FRANCESCO BLANCHETTI
In his writings, letters and annotations in the manuscript scores, Salieri invokes very often the search for "the truth" as a guideline for his theater music. The composer pursues the adherence to the dramatic basis not only by means of his thematic inventiveness, both vocal and instrumental, but also by paying very special attention to the harmonic treatment. A striking aspect in Salieri's style is a leaning for tonal surprises, interrupted cadences, emphasized dissonances.
12. INGRID FUCHS
The most favorite parts of Salieri’s operas were performed outside the theater – in public and private concerts, in musical academies, but also during music-making in the homes, which contributed to the popularization of his works .These performances were normally not carried out in the original instrumentation, but by special orchestras reserved for the noble circles.
Arrangements with extraordinary intrumentations can also be found at the emperor’s court in the so-called „Harmoniemusik“ of Joseph II.
13. DOROTHEA LINK
The entertainments at the imperial country palace of Laxenburg are examined for the séjours held there in 1784, 1786, 1787, and 1791. The theatrical fare is assessed for its interaction with that presented at the imperial theatre in Vienna. Transcriptions of the expenditures for Laxenburg recorded in the theatre account books are provided in four appendices.
14.WALTHER BRAUNEIS
The court theater (Gesellschaftstheater) in Vienna using the example of Johann Adam von Auersperg and Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz with simultaneous consideration of the performance of the opera’s by Antonio Salieri.
15. WALTHER BRAUNEIS
For the Vienna Kaerntnertortheater Lorenzo Sacchetti created 1804 a new curtain. Salieri
appears on it.
16. JANE SCHATKIN HETTRICK
The pamphlet Ueber die Kirchenmusik in Wien, published anonymously in Vienna in 1781, describes the intrusion of secular elements into church music of the time: opera arias transformed into mass movements, singers behaving like stage actors, religious services turned into concerts—all factors leading to immorality by parishioners. The author specifically mentions three opera titles (one by Salieri) recently heard in churches. To strengthen his opinions, he draws from the encyclical Annus qui (1749), in which Pope Benedict XIV quotes ecclesiastical authorities who criticize theatrical music in the church.
17. PAOLOGIOVANNI MAIONE - FRANCESCA SELLER
The revolution that was brought about by Barbaja in 19th century theatrical organisation changed the impresarios’ typical 18th century methods, which had become obsolete by then. The new market requirements, no longer focused on the centrality of the Court, required greater attention to a more complex and modern entrepreneurial vision. The wave of novelty on the Neapolitan theatrical scene since 1809, the year of the impresario’s first contract, launched the new model onto the international scene: it was a system that was gradually defined over the years and finally affirmed in the Twenties, when gambling was definitively separated from the theatre management.
18. GIACOMO FORNARI
It was not just the change of epochs due to the Congress of Vienna, but also the advent
of a new musical language that determined a change in the expectations of the Viennese
public in those years. The passing of Antonio Salieri also permitted the slow yet steady disappearance of his works from the repertoire, leaving an empty space that was largely filled by
the music of Gioachino Rossini. The various documents presented allow us to retrace that
fundamental moment, which is also described in Le Haydine and Le Rossiniane by Giuseppe
Carpani, a valuable and particularly reliable witness to the musical changes of those times.
19. RUDOLPH ANGERMUELLER
In the last years 10 documents were found.