Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century
Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century

Author: Robert M. Isherwood

Publisher: Ithaca [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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The arts, particularly music, are viewed in this work as an integral part of evolving royal absolutism during the reign of Louis XIV. Drawing extensively on archival documents and musical scores, the author views the historical association of music and monarchy as a continuous development beginning with the Valois and climaxing in Louis XIV’s reign. The king is pictured as a rational, calculating man whose luxurious life style was politically motivated, and who undertook the centralization of the arts to assure French artistic preeminence. Elaborate, costly musical productions were also used to distract the nobility, to demonstrate French affluence to foreign powers, and to embellish the royal image.

Music in the Seventeenth Century
Music in the Seventeenth Century

Author: Lorenzo Bianconi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987-11-26

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780521269155

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Examines musical life in the seventeenth century, a period of profound change in the history of music.

Music and Theatre
Music and Theatre

Author: Nigel Fortune

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-17

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780521619288

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This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera
The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera

Author: Jacqueline Waeber

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-22

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 1108915914

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The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

Gods of Play
Gods of Play

Author: Kristiaan Aercke

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1994-08-04

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780791420508

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This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the “splendid festive performance” of spectacular plays and operas given at absolutist courts in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Versailles, and Vienna between 1631 and 1668. Gods of Play fills voids in the scholarly literature on the seventeenth-century, on absolutism, on courtly theatricality, and on the philosophy of play. Aercke demonstrates that such splendid performances were not just frivolous entertainment for the courtly class but were serious activities with far-ranging political consequences.