Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera

Author: Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1107137896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.


Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera

Author: Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1316776719

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.


Essays on the Performance of Baroque Music

Essays on the Performance of Baroque Music

Author: Mary Cyr

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Using composers' own notations, marks added by 18th-century performers, historical treatises, and pictorial evidence, this work investigates both vocal and instrumental genres, including opera, cantatas, instrumental chamber music, and solo music for the viol and violin. It also deals with the discovery of a cantata by Rameau.


Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Author: Olivia Bloechl

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 022652275X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.


Nineteenth-century Choral Music

Nineteenth-century Choral Music

Author: Donna Marie Di Grazia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 543

ISBN-13: 0415988527

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is a collection of essays studying choral music making as a cultural phenomenon, one that had an impact on multiple parts of society. Rather than merely offering a collection of raw descriptions of works, the contributors focus their discussions on what these pieces reveal about their composers as craftsmen/women. Major works as well as other equally rich parts of the repertoire are discussed, including smaller choral works and contributions by composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn, Amy Beach, Charles Stanford,


Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Author: Olivia Bloechl

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 022652289X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.


Essays on the Performance of Baroque Music

Essays on the Performance of Baroque Music

Author: Mary Cyr

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 104023187X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this collection of essays Mary Cyr explores some of the written and unwritten performance conventions that applied to French and English music of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Using composers' own notations, marks added by 18th-century performers, historical treatises, and pictorial evidence, she investigates both vocal and instrumental genres, including opera, cantatas, instrumental chamber music, and solo music for the viol and violin. Some of the performance conventions remain controversial, such as the use of gesture by the French opera chorus, and others are still little-known, such as the use of the double bass for rhythmic and harmonic support in early 18th-century French opera. As many of these essays demonstrate, French Baroque music allowed performers a wider latitude of nuance and expression than is often assumed today. The essays in this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and performers who are interested in adopting a historically-informed approach to performing music by Henry Purcell, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and their contemporaries. Several studies also deal with attributions, sources, and the discovery of a cantata by Rameau.


French Baroque Opera: A Reader

French Baroque Opera: A Reader

Author: Caroline Wood

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1317132769

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades. This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an often entertaining insight into Lully’s once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new illustrations.


A History of Opera

A History of Opera

Author: Burton D. Fisher

Publisher: Opera Journeys Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1930841981

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A comprehensive history of opera that traces each milestone in opera history from the 16th century Camerata through the next 400 years, and featurrd in depth analysis of all important genres: the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, Bel Canto, Opera Buffa, German Romanticism, Wagner and music drama, Verismo, Impressionism, Expressionism, Serialism, and much more.


Opera Remade, 1700-1750

Opera Remade, 1700-1750

Author: Charles Dill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 1351555731

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances, who the people-composers and performers-were who made opera possible. The essays for this volume capture the principal themes of current research: the "idea" of opera, opera criticism, the people of opera, and the emerging technologies of opera.