Baroque opera

Cette représentation fait partie des épreuves imposées à l'étudiante suivante pour l'obtention d'une Maîtrise en musique (spécialisation en interprétation) et le programme d'opéra. / This performance is presented by the following students in partial fulfi lment of the requirements for the degree of

This is the first study to examine Antonio Vivaldi's opera, Orlando finto pazzo, in relation to its source text, Matteo Boiardo's masterpiece, Orlando innamorato. The intent of this analysis is to revive interest in a work that was overshadowed by the critically acclaimed Giovanni Ristori opus, Orlando furioso. While the librettist Grazio Braccioli preserves familiar traits of Boiardo's protagonists, he inventively develops their strengths and weaknesses to the audience's delight. Orlando, who remains hopelessly clueless about his adored Angelica's nefarious motives, nevertheless eventually wises up to his former mistress Origille's pattern of treachery.

No, these first steps will not make you a master of Baroque Gesture. But they will create the conditions in which you can study and practise further.

So, whilst you are putting in the time to internalise the collected wisdom of Quintilian, Bulwer & Bonifacio, to memorise the complete works of Shakespeare and/or to translate all the ‘opera’ libretti from Anima e Corpo (1600) to Poppea (1643), to learn all of Negri’s courtly dances, and to become a rapier-master according to Capo Ferro, here are some quick and easy short-cuts, literally from the ground up.

In Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera. Edited by Gregory J. Decker and Matthew Shaftel. New York, Oxford University Press.

In this chapter, I make a case for the interpretive significance of Baroque topics by examining historical thought and modern analytical precedent, detailing the types of significations these topics might convey, and presenting case studies that demonstrate the efficacy of musical topics in the analysis of opera seria. These case studies are drawn from the Italian language operas of G.F. Handel and focus on his uses of the minuet and the gigue. The strategic use of dance topics in the late Baroque was likely meaningful to Handel’s audiences and can still be useful for interpretation today.

P r e f a c e with eighteenth-century re-embodiments of these tales and characters. the experiment was refreshing, to say the least, and led to the conclusion that opera seria lacked a standard formula to represent even a specific myth-for instance, we found three composers endorsing as many different dramaturgical solutions to conclude the iphigenia in Aulis, despite their libretti being adapted from the same tragedy, Jean Racine's Iphigénie (1674). 4 Illustration 1. soprano soetkin elbers rehearsing clytemnestra in Ifigenia (brussels, December 2006). photograph by matthias schellens. 4. Ifigenia contained excerpts from Antonio caldara's Ifigenia in Aulide (Vienna, 1718; libretto by Apostolo Zeno), carl heinrich graun's Ifigenia in Aulide (berlin, 1748; libretto by Leopoldo de' Villati after a scenario by Frederick the great and Francesco Algarotti), and niccolò Jommelli's L'Ifigenìa (Rome, 1751; anonymous libretto). on their various conclusions, see Reinhard strohm's chapter. Reprint from (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancient Régime Opera-ISBN 978 90 5867 900 0-© Leuven University Press P r e f a c e 1 (Dis)embodying myths in Ancien Régime opera seeks to shed new light on the chameleonic appearance of mythology in musical drama between c. 1600 and 1800. 5 indeed, opera in this period capitalized on the scenic potential of myth to no mean degree. At its inception, in late Renaissance Florence, the favola in musica (literally: 'fable in music') was almost uniquely built upon the crystal palace of ovidian mythology. With the 'rediscovered' monody (recitar cantando) seen as a genuine equivalent to orphic song, 6 the magical and healing powers of which were ascribed to extraordinary men, early opera staged the "ancient deities, such as Apollo, thetis, neptune, and other respected gods," but also the "demigods and ancient heroes," and in particular those "perfect musicians" like orpheus himself, Amphion, or David-the words are drawn from the anonymous tract Il Corago (see Jean-François Lattarico's chapter). 7 but the presence of myth in Ancien Régime opera was anything but uninterrupted or unproblematic. Difficulties arose from the very concept of 'myth' itself, which we today could define, with mircea eliade, as a "story of the deeds of supernatural beings" that "concerns a creation" and is considered "absolutely true" and "sacred" by its users. 8 When applied to seventeenth-or eighteenth-century opera, however, this definition proves unstable, if not inadequate. For instance, pietro metastasio's Didone abbandonata (1724), the most popular libretto ever to deal with the legend of Dido and Aeneas, introduces the supernatural in only an indirect, invisible sense (as bruno Forment's chapter points out). granted, the libretto alludes to two creations (carthage by Dido and Rome by Aeneas and his offspring), the latter of which must have borne 'sacred' implications for metastasio, Roman-born and a lifelong representative of romanitas. All the same, the poet cannot have considered the Vergilian story "absolutely true," for in his foreword, metastasio acknowledged the concurrence of Aeneas' wanderings after the trojan War (thirteenth century bc) and the 5. the term 'Ancien Régime' was chosen for the sake of comprehensiveness: alternative labels (e.g., 'baroque' or 'classicism') simply fail to encompass the stylistic breadth of the two centuries of operatic history dealt with in this book. 6. see tomlinson 1999, 17. 7. Anonymous 1983, 63: "per cominciare da personaggi o interloquitori che la rapresentazione armonica pare che più convenevolmente abbracci, sembrano molto a proposito per le azioni profane le deità antiche come Apollo, teti, nettuno et altri stimati numi, come anche i semidei et eroi vetusti ... e sopra tutti quei personaggi che stimiamo essere stati perfetti musici, come orfeo, Anfione e simili." 8. eliade 1991, 5.

Rappresentata per la prima volta a Venezia durante la stagione di car-nevale del 1643, L'incoronazione di Poppea è l'ultima opera attribuibile, del tutto o in parte, a Claudio Monteverdi. Oltre a essere una delle poche opere, forse l'unica, del primo Seicento a essere entrata stabil-mente nel repertorio contemporaneo, è sicuramente uno dei drammi musicali più complessi e ambigui del suo genere. Questo libro offre un'introduzione ai temi e ai personaggi dell' opera, insieme a una guida all'ascolto, entrambe rivolte ad un pubblico inclusivo, sia universitario che non specialistico.

The article examines the first Italian translation of Ursula Kirkendale's studies about Handel's Roman years and how influential her work has been until now - Prince Ruspoli Musical and Musicological Prize being one of its most welcome effects. The translation was issued by LIM in 2017 and it is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the groundbreaking writings by Ursula Kirkendale, carefully commented by her eminent husband Warren Kirkendale. Moreover, the article proposes a new answer to an old question: why biographers (before Ursula Kirkendale) did not say much about the composer's Roman years and his departure from the Eternal City.

This chapter examined Claude's seaports through their relationship with contemporary theatre and the intellectual and cultural life of the Barberini era. In particular it linked Claude's sunsets to both the intense scientific study of the sun taking place in these years and Urban VIII's use of the solar imagery as his personal iconography.

Like many kinds of popular entertainment, the opera of seventeenth-century Venice relied heavily on formulae. From the lamenting queen to the comic servant, creators had numerous stock characters and plot elements to draw upon, recombine, and vary almost endlessly. However, the genre’s daring treatment of sexuality often overshadows a significant stock character-trait: sworn chastity, the rejection not only of one specific courtship, but of sexual (and usually romantic) intimacy in general.

Characters that assert such convictions (particularly women, and most such assertors are female in these operas) stand firmly apart from societal norms. Yet, far from embodying a monolithic stereotype, these characters offer a wide range of perspectives on desire, charting diverse courses through their respective music-dramas as they attempt to reconcile their vow with the pressures of a world (and sometimes a person) that seeks to invalidate them.

This paper surveys some of the character-type’s most prominent incarnations, many of whom separate sex not only from romance but also from sensuous pleasure (partnered and otherwise), validating non-standard relationships in a manner strikingly evocative of twenty-first century asexual discourse. It examines both the origins and outcomes of such convictions, from necessity to fear to genuine disinterest, and from empoweringly happy to disturbingly ‘corrective’ and cautionary endings. And it interrogates the numerous ways in which the characters themselves portray their convictions, from the identity crisis faced by Diana upon realizing that she has fallen in love, to Penelope’s carefully cultivated (yet not necessarily dissembled) image as a perpetually mourning widow.

Might composers of solo song and opera c.1600 have modelled these emerging musical forms, in part, on plainchant recitation? As this dissertation demonstrates, chant and monody were contiguous musical practices, united in their imitation of ancient speech-like song, with composers like Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, and Claudio Monteverdi inserting chant-like formulas into their solo vocal works. The evocation of plainchant in early monody may have had a pointed purpose: to gesture musically towards antiquity and to formulate a distinct melodic character for solo-voiced music. This was by virtue of plainchant’s apparently “antique” remnants: use of mode, extended recitation, and centrality of text. By exploring intersections between sacred and secular spheres in Early Modern Italy, and by examining chant, monodies, and theoretical writings from ca. 1600, this dissertation highlights the previously obscured triangle of plainchant, ancient song, and monody. It furthermore provides new tools for analysis of music in the formative years of the first operas, and reframes sixteenth-century plainchant—largely neglected in music histories—as a significant creative force in Early Modern musical culture.

Im Zentrum dieses Bandes steht die Fest- und Opernkultur am Wittelsbacher Hof während der Herrschaft der Kurfürsten Max Emanuel (1680–1726) und Karl Albrecht (1726–1745). Betrachtet wird vor allem die Intention des Fürstenhauses, den Unter­tanen auf diese Weise die Notwendigkeit der bestehenden Ordnung zu vermitteln und zugleich die konkurrierenden Höfe von der Macht des bayerischen Hofes zu über­zeugen. Opern, Turnierspiele und Festkantaten werden dazu in die höfischen Kommunikationszusammenhänge eingeordnet. Der Autor zeigt, wie die politisch-kulturelle Gegenwart in den Aufführungen gespiegelt wurde, indem in ihnen der konkrete Aufführungsanlass verarbeitet, aber auch Aspekte der höfischen Lebenspraxis in symbolischer Form zum Ausdruck gebracht wurden.

Traditional narratives of music history have presented Johann Georg Pisendel as a composing violin virtuoso and a possible inspiration for Bach's solo sonatas. However, if one disregards traditional categories such as 'composer' or 'virtuoso' and considers Pisendel's merits as music director praised by his contemporaries, the supposed second rate master proves to be a true 'key figure in the German musical life of the baroque' (Christoph Wolff). Due to the central position of Pisendel as a student of Torelli and Vivaldi, as a friend of Telemann and Bach, as a colleague of Heinichen and Hasse and as a teacher of Quantz and two brothers Graun in this section of music history, the work offers numerous impulses for neighboring research areas and provides vivid insights into the musical life of the Bach era.

After a biographical section that considers a large number of unpublished sources, the study focuses on Pisendel's school-building orchestral education. This intended to ensure a differentiated reproduction of international musical styles, which is reflected in numerous entries by Pisendel in the Dresden instrumental repertoire. For the first time, Pisendel's practice of musical direction is presented, which anticipated the modern professional conductor and established the fame of the Dresden orchestra. Important insights go far beyond Pisendel, such as the definition of concertmaster's office as "vice-Kapellmeister of instrumental music" or insights into the structure and ownership of musical repertoire libraries. Even the reconstruction of performance norms, which were not explicitly noted in the score, results in fundamental new approaches to the performance and editing practice in this important repertoire. A catalogue raisonné of Pisendel’s works and documents completes this extraordinary study.

The opera aria, having to express the emotional and reflective feeling of a subject, is the result of factors which are not only related to the production system, but also to anthropological and cultural codes belonging to the people who employ it. Dramaturgical poetics, rhetorical formulas, and formal structure are the elements through which the aria em bodies these codes, becoming a symbolic projection of how a specific population conceives and represents the reaction of an individual in an existential instant and in a specific relational context. In order to consider the anthropological factors that may have affected the musical elaboration of the aria, it is useful to examine contemporary stereotypes about the temperaments of people in each nation, which were often used at that time to explain differences in the artistic productions of various countries. After a rereading of the querelle, straddling the 17th and 18th centuries, on the superiority of ltalian or French opera, I reflect on the relationship between emotional stereotypes attributed to Italians and the compositional aspects that characterize perception, especially the transalpine one, regarding the Italian aria, in contrast with the French one. More generally, my objective is to study in depth the interrelationship between formal strategies and the specificity of “national” anthropological cultures.

A discussion  of the essays on the economic structures of the early Venetian  opera  which  Lorenzo Bianconi, Giovanni Morelli and Thomas Walker published  between 1976 and 1984,    with reference to Hellmuth Christian Wollff’s  seminal book  on this subject matter as well as to  Max Weber's theory  of capitalism and Fernand Braudel’s  writings on Venetian economy in the 17th century.

The morphology of Baroque arias, both in their few pre-eighteenth-century variants and in the later da capo model, has not been fully explained in relationship with its symbolic function, which is that of being the privileged site of subjective expression. In arias, unity of affect and formal standardization contradict the post-eighteenth-century idea of a psychological development. It is therefore necessary to study them through the aesthetic and cultural categories of the time in which they were composed. In this perspective, in the last decades scholars have interpreted the tendency of aria to be stereotypical and circular as a sounding metaphor of human beings’ rationality (Michael Robinson), as a discursive model to self-regulate an emotional outlet and to dissimulate it (Silke Leopold), and as a moment in which a character recognizes and identifies thoughts and passions from which he or she is stirred, codifying them according to shared formal parameters, in order to assure their recognizability.
Starting from these hypotheses, and in particular from this last, this article—through a comparative reading of different types of sources concerning the musical theory and the aesthetics of opera, but also wider cultural reflections on passions (in philosophy, physiology, and rhetoric)—aims at providing a conceptual basis to explain Baroque arias (and their morphological and chronometric transformations) as symbolic projections of the temporality needed by the soul to organize thoughts and affections. Isabelle Moindrot has emphasized that one of the assumptions on which the coherence of Italian musical dramaturgy is founded is precisely the illusion of the temporal development of the soul, besides that of the spatial development of opera stages. Her perspective facilitates the study of the morphological transformations affecting arias between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries—their increasing structural articulation, the multiplication of the repeated sections, and the lengthening of coloraturas. These transformations are means aimed not only at offering an ever increasing space to virtuosic display (of both composers and performers) but also at prolonging the temporal extension of the pieces themselves; this in a period in which philosophical and scientific thought tends to consider cognitive processes as becoming increasingly wide-ranging and complex, thanks to the more relevant role assigned to passions.
The article is organized into three sections. The first section shows that arias, according to the correspondence between interiority and exteriority pursued by seventeenth-century culture, probably are popular because they, like monologues, play on the audiences’ voyeuristic pleasure for private aspects: those same aspects that instead, in court life, had to be dissimulated, thus becoming hardly known. Furthermore, contemporaneous considerations regarding the relationship between the shorter length of a monologue and the actual mental process that it represents (or, as we would call it today, between a closed and an open temporality) emphasize the awareness of the meanings implicit in the chronometric dimension of subjective expression; this awareness is perhaps reflected in the tendency to increasingly extend the length of arias.
In the second section of the article, the frequent repetitions and the formal circularity of da capo arias are interpreted as projections of a process of mental “rumination.” This process is typical of the cognitive developments determined by emotions and reflections, and it is characterized by a redundant, obstinate, and persisting thought. Both the rumination—which happens in the soul— and the successive externalization of one’s own feeling—which happens in arias—are today defined by psychologists as strategies of “coping,” aiming at producing meaning: by ruminating, one can identify one’s own feelings, understand their implications, and control emotional experiences, keeping an objective as aim. Moreover, the repetitions of lines and sections of arias can be interpreted, based on contemporaneous treatises on rhetoric, as figures of speech that indicate one’s own emotional involvement, as if the power of an emotion were such that it could block the linearity of speech.
The last section of the article deals with the chronometric extension of arias, by discussing contemporaneous philosophical and physiological references to a subject’s emotional and cognitive temporality. Its duration is proportional not only to the psycho-physic impulse of a passion but also to the age and maturity of an individual, that is, to his or her capacity for mental elaboration. This explains why in operas, according to conventions, the longest and more complex arias are assigned to the protagonists and to the more noble characters in the drama, since they are indeed those who experience the most intense affects and the most profound reflections. This diversity in affective or gnomic content, however, is not reflected by the formal structure of arias, which remains identical, especially in the da capo version: this may mean that this musical structure embodies a generic discursive model of organized rationalization and communication of interiority. Through arias, then, characters, by representing through music the temporal extension of their conscience, give both a meaning to their selves and a symbolic form to mental processes often triggered by passions.

(English translation by Mauro Calcagno)

This paper supplements Gebauer and Wulf's analyses of mimesis as a mechanism for the construction of social reality. After situating archaic musical mimesis in the context of Homeric performance and its critique in Plato, I demonstrate how musical mimesis functions as an assemblage of inscription of social mores and values through two case studies. The first examines how this mimetic mechanism is actualised in the 1589 Medici intermedi as an allegorical apparatus of capture that enables the sovereign to control the space and time of the performance. The second examines how this apparatus is redeployed by seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in South America to coerce nomadic Indigenous peoples into settlements known as 'reducciones'. The paper advances an account of the darker role of musical mimesis in the dissymmetrical construction of social reality during the baroque: as a world-making tool of sovereign power and a world-destroying mechanism of epistemic genocide in colonised territories.

Nel 1988, quando Carl Dahlhaus pubblicava il suo contributo sulla Drammaturgia dell'opera italiana, l'atteggiamento degli storici nei confronti dell'opera seria settecentesca era già ambiguo. Accanto ai detrattori, che vi rintracciavano un'assenza di coerenza tra i diversi numeri, vi era chi intendeva rendere giustizia all'opera metastasiana in un'ottica evoluzionistica, ovvero cercando in questa presunta mancanza il «carattere originario di una forma drammatico-musicale che soltanto nelle "opere riformate" [...] avrebbe trovato la sua "vera" fisionomia, fin da sempre latente e prefissata». 1 Vi era poi chi, secondo Dahlhaus, negava del tutto la sua incoerenza e chi, infine, provava a giustificarla drammaturgicamente. Numerosi sono gli studi che negli ultimi anni hanno contribuito a migliorare la conoscenza di questo genere: edizioni critiche, monografie, convegni e un'ampia saggistica su opere, compositori, cantanti settecenteschi sino a quel momento quasi del tutto trascurati. 2 Nonostante ciò, l'opera seria settecentesca stenta a tro-* Questo articolo rappresenta un approfondimento di alcuni capitoli della mia tesi di dottorato (Affetti in scena. Le opere serie di Pergolesi tra drammaturgia e regia), discussa all'Università degli Studi di Siena nel 2013. Desidero ringraziare Andrea Chegai, mio tutor di dottorato, e Carlo Lanfossi per avere letto in anteprima queste pagine, contribuendo con i loro commenti a migliorarle.

Cesare Morelli made thirty-two arrangements of airs and recitative from Lully's operas, Cadmus et Hermione and Thesee, for his employer Samuel Pepys, in the early 1680s. These arrangements were created at a time when French music, including developments in early opera, was exercising strong influence on culture in England. This research presents a performing edition of these previously unpublished and unrecorded arrangements, with an accompanying recording, and places them in their musical and historical context, with a focus on the guitar. Detailed examination of the manuscript shows that Morelli's arrangements have many similarities to available sources of Cadmus and Thesee, but that there are significant differences. This raises questions about his own source material and his decisions as an arranger. The operatic productions that took place in France in the 1670s were grandly expensive and politically meaningful but Morelli's arrangements represent a contrasting reduction to the domestic sphere using minimal forces. Almost from the time of their composition, Lully's scores are not textually fixed; they are disseminated throughout European musical life, used and re-imagined by those who could obtain the music.