This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Mauro Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. Calcagno traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch’s love poetry arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view.
"In this bold, highly original book, Mauro Calcagno ventures into areas where no other scholar has tread. He explores the Petrarchian view of the self over a century-long arc from the early madrigal to the beginnings of opera, with Monteverdi's masterpieces taking center stage. A brilliant tour de force, From Madrigal to Opera proffers a remarkable new way to look at music, performance, and reception that rings true not only for the early modern period but also for our own age. A must read for scholars, performers, and lovers of early music."—Jane A. Bernstein, author of Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice "The mini-renaissance of early modern music studies continues apace, and Mauro Calcagno's From Madrigal to Opera is its latest, particularly impressive installment. Drawing on methodological impulses from a variety of sources—linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and, above all, performance studies—Calcagno pays close attention to the interplay of the abstract text and live performance in both early opera and late madrigal. Common strategies, rooted in Petrarch's poetic practice, indeed united the two genres. This book will shape the discussion of early modern vocal music in the coming years."—Karol Berger is the author of Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. "In this pathbreaking study, Calcagno offers a new and dynamic interpretation of the relationship between Monteverdi's madrigals and operas based on perceptions of subjectivity expressed in Renaissance literature—the poetry of Petrarch in particular. Calcagno interprets Monteverdi's work as realizing a Petrarchan notion of the dialogical self, a concept that extends well beyond the early modern period to illuminate and enrich our own experience of virtually any vocal work in performance. This book should be required reading not only for those interested in music and text of the Early Modern period, but for anyone involved in performance studies."—Ellen Rosand, author of Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy.
Erik fakes his death and vows the Phantom would never again haunt the Opera Garnier. His heart beats for two opposite women: Christine, who he longs to love, and Anna, the woman who saw beyond his bitter soul to the man beneath the mask.
Covering over 1500 singers from the birth of opera to the present day, this marvelous volume will be an essential resource for all serious opera lovers and an indispensable companion to the enormously successful Grove Book of Operas. The most comprehensive guide to opera singers ever produced, this volume offers an alphabetically arranged collection of authoritative biographies that range from Marion Anderson (the first African American to perform at the Met) to Benedict Zak (the classical tenor and close friend and colleague of Mozart). Readers will find fascinating articles on such opera stars as Maria Callas and Enrico Caruso, Ezio Pinza and Fyodor Chaliapin, Lotte Lehmann and Jenny Lind, Lily Pons and Luciano Pavarotti. The profiles offer basic information such as birth date, vocal style, first debut, most memorable roles, and much more. But these articles often go well beyond basic biographical information to offer colorful portraits of the singer's personality and vocal style, plus astute evaluations of their place in operatic history and many other intriguing observations. Many entries also include suggestions for further reading, so that anyone interested in a particular performer can explore their life and career in more depth. In addition, there are indexes of singers by voice type and by opera role premiers. The articles are mostly drawn from the acclaimed Grove Music Online and have been fully revised, and the book is further supplemented by more than 40 specially commissioned articles on contemporary singers. A superb new guide from the first name in opera reference, The Grove Book of Opera Singers is a lively and authoritative work, beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white pictures. It is an essential volume--and the perfect gift--for opera lovers everywhere.
In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself—the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.
"Claudio Monteverdi's sixty-year compositional career spans one of the most crucial junctures in Western music. Laying the groundwork for harmonic tonality - the pervasive musical language of Western culture until the twentieth century - Monteverdi's break with the self-contained harmonic world of the Renaissance and his confident assertion of human rationality and order through music was a crucial contribution to the emergence of the Baroque style." "Monteverdi's Tonal Language is a provocative new examination of the theoretical issues surrounding the emergence of early seventeenth-century tonality combined with systematic analysis of a wide range of Monteverdi's secular works. Eric Chafe argues that the composer's music was rooted in a strong sense of musical logic and a secure grasp of tonality combined with Monteverdi's assertion that music should be dominated by allegory Chafe offers a new framework for understanding the complex historical style and systematic features of the tonal language of Monteverdi's time and the composer's particular version of it." "Building on Carl Dahlhaus's analysis of emerging tonality in Monteverdi's madrigals, Chafe expands the scope of the "modal-hexachordal" system rooted in the composer's work at the time of his fourth and fifth madrigal books. In addition to covering text-music relationships of a large and representative amount of Monteverdi's music, Chafe discusses several unexplored areas crucial to any understanding of the composer's tonal language. The two madrigals "Cor mio, mentre vi miro" (from Book Four) and "O Mirtillo" (from Book Five) illustrate the theoretical features of early seventeenth-century tonality. Chafe examines the pronounced sense of tonal clarity that distinguishes the Fourth Book of Madrigals, and he articulates the tonal styles Monteverdi used as organizing criteria in the Fifth Book. In subsequent chapters he demonstrates how the characteristic devices of Orfeo emerge as basic properties of the "modal-hexachordal" system, and discusses Monteverdi's creation of ordered reality in Il Ballo delle in grate and the "Lamento d'Arianna." He further argues that the Sixth Book symbolized the interaction of polyphonic madrigal and monody, and demonstrates convincingly that the Seventh Book was a milestone in Monteverdi's creative development, assuming the characteristics that marked his later tonal style. In the Eighth Book the composer set forth a manifesto for the allegorical nature of Baroque music; Il ritorno d'Ulisse un patria is a mature working out of the potential of tonal allegory. Finally in the last three chapters, Chafe discusses the tonal-allegorical framework, aspects of musical characterization, and questions of authenticity in Monteverdi's last opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Monteverdi's Voices provides a comprehensive account of the musical madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. Author Tim Carter sheds light on how these wonderfully witty works played a key role in music-historical development, offering offer key insights into the cultural, social, and intellectual life of Europe on the cusp of modernity, and shows why they continue to be cornerstones of the repertory for performers of early music.
Examines five great periods -- the Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic, and Modern -- and discusses every important type of composition from each era.
Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido (1589) began its life as a play, but soon was transformed through numerous musical settings by prominent composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the many lives of this work, this book explores what happens when a lover’s lament is transplanted from the theatrical stage to the courtly chamber, from speech to song, and from a single speaking character to an ensemble of singers, shedding new light on early modern literary and musical culture. From the play’s beginnings in manuscripts, private readings, and aborted stage productions in the 1580s and 1590s, through the gradual decline of Pastor fido madrigals in the 1640s, this book examines how this widely read yet controversial text became the center of a lasting and prolific music tradition. Using a new integrative system of musical-textual analysis based on sixteenth-century theory, Seth Coluzzi demonstrates how composers responded not only to the sentiments, imagery, and form of the play’s speeches, but also to subtler details of Guarini’s verse. Viewing the musical history of Guarini’s work as an integral part of the play’s roles in the domains of theater, literature, and criticism, this book brings a new perspective to the late Italian madrigal, the play, and early modern patronage and readership across a diverse geographical and temporal frame.
