Early Opera Research Articles

Il natal di Amore by Giulio Strozzi: interactions and echoes with the early modern literary and operatic world and Monteverdi

ABSTRACT As many scholars of early modern musical theatre certainly know, a careful perusal of literature not specifically meant for music may at times hold pleasant surprises for the discerning musical scholar. This may be particularly rewarding in the study of the first decades of Venetian opera, when librettists were often also active as novelists and/or playwrights and were in any case affiliated to or personally acquainted with members of the most outspoken literary academy of the early seventeenth century, the ‘Accademia degli Incogniti’, itself very closely involved in the establishment of public opera. Moreover, as several studies have shown, the conception and production of early opera libretti can be better understood if analysed within the context of contemporary purely literary works. And sometimes, as I will try to show here, a literary work, in this case a theatre play, may both have provided inspiration for as well as have been inspired by musical drama. As I hope to demonstrate, the implication of these musico-literary interconnections is the partial disclosure of a tight network of cultural products of the period and the significant role therein played by Claudio Monteverdi’s operas, not the least also in providing unconventional and alternative outlooks on gender and gender roles.

Emily Wilbourne. Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (Review)

Book Review. Wilbourne does not only apply queer theory to an analysis of Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s early operas; she queers our very understanding of opera, pushing forward a strong theoretical concept demonstrated through discussion of Kats-Chernin’s works.

“The Specter of Drama in the Specter of Another Drama”: The Anamorphosis of the Singspiel and the Palimpsest Effect in Aspern by Salvatore Sciarrino

The article explores the early opera by Salvatore Sciarrino, based on Henry James’s novelette The Aspern Papers. Sciarrino’s Aspern has aroused considerable interest both in the aspect of the transposition of James’s prose into the musical sphere, and in terms of the formation of the poetics of musical theater and the principles of the composer’s dramatic thinking. The experimental character of the singspiel (in the author’s definition) was stipulated by the idea of representation as an act of composition. Rejecting the traditional format, Sciarrino and his co-author of the libretto Giorgio Marini created an intertextual connection between the novelette and the opera, having turned the reading of the text into an element of dramaturgy, along with other components — the singing, the music and the stage decorations. The protagonists of the story (the Narrator, Giuliana, Titta) dissolved in the recitations of various actors. The arias based on the texts of Lorenzo da Ponte from Le Nozze de Figaro, performed by one single singing protagonist, the Female Singer, offstage, created an ironic estrangement on the scenic (between the dramatic performance in spoken dialogues and the music) and the stylistic levels (between da Ponte’s text and Sciarrino’s music). The special optics of artistic imagination established this way, making it possible to view the one through the other, helped the “ghost” of Mozart, the musical equivalent of the “divine Aspern,” appear. Mozart’s “disturbing presence” also explains the unexpected genre-related definition given by the composer to his work. The singspiel becomes an object of anamorphosis, in which elements of the genre projected from the past acquire a strange oneiric form in the present. Reflecting on Sciarrino’s invitation to search for “music in the music and drama in the drama” in Aspern, the author of the article reveals the connections between the Italian maestro’s opera and Piotr Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, set up by the palimpsest effect hidden in James’ original text. An important connecting link between the two operas is the figure of Mozart as the ideal of “the Composer”, who had managed to absorb and transform the traditions of different eras and national schools of composition. In this light, Sciarrino’s Aspern becomes a musical metaphor of the search for and the finding of oneself in the “traces” of others.

Long-Term Treatment With First-Line Ocrelizumab in Patients With Early RMS: 9-Year OPERA Subgroup Analysis (S46.002)

Long-Term Treatment With First-Line Ocrelizumab in Patients With Early RMS: 9-Year OPERA Subgroup Analysis (S46.002)

Возрожденный Вайнберг. Сюита для симфонического оркестра oр. 26. Тембровая поэтика

On June 12, 2021, under the auspices of the International Creative Workshop “Terra Musica” at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory one could hear a special concert. It began with the presentation of book written by Y. Abdokov “Nikolay Peyko. Having fulfilled his mystery…”. It was published by the Publishing House “Russian Conservatory” and the Moscow Patriarchate Publishers. The musical program of the evening was composed of the orchestral opuses by N. I. Peyko, N. Y. Myaskovsky, D.D. Shostakovich, B.A. Tchaikovsky and G.G. Galynin. Moreover, the climax of the program was the world premiere of the Suite for the Symphony Orchestra op. 26 by Moisey Samuilovich Weinberg (1919–1996). The author's manuscript of the work was kindly provided by the composer’s widow Olga Yulievna Rakhalskaya. In the few sources where the Suite is mentioned, there is no systematic analysis that allows to comprehend the etymology of the composer's orchestral thinking. Meanwhile, in the early opus there are the features in closest future will determine the physiognomy of Weinberg’s orchestral style: the graphic relief of orchestral melos, the priority of pure paint in the formation of the timbre palette, the importance of timbre-optical modulation (linear “overflows” and transformations of timbre focus) in orchestral deployment, the virtuosity of the agogic development of instrumental texture, when the characteristic strokes and principles of sound production are likened to various types of pictorial painting, etc. The article reflects the experience of reviving the score, studying its timbral poetics, embodying the most striking properties of Weinberg’s orchestral style. The analysis was undertaken with the broad context of issues of composer and conductor phenomenology.

Wagner's Shakespeare: Das Liebesverbot, the Problem Comedy and the Carnivalesque

This paper explores Wagner's early comedic opera, Das Liebesverbot. Though his ‘mature comedy’ Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been the focus of much scholarly attention, the composer's first and only other foray into the genre has been much less studied and often outright dismissed. While contemporary scholars have increasingly looked to Wagner's pre-Dutchman operas, they often read them purely in light of his later works; with this examination of his adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, I offer a consideration of the young composer's work in its own right. After considering issues of textual and cultural adaptation, this paper offers close readings of several passages of the opera, in tandem with parallel scenes from the original play-text, to show how Wagner's transformation of this not-quite-so-comedic comedy into an expression of the carnivalesque reveals an expansive and cosmopolitan artistic and political philosophy during a period during which he was greatly influenced by the authors of the Junges Deutschland movement. Such a reconsideration disrupts the standard conception of a composer who is still often considered, in his own words, the ‘most German being’. Here, we see Wagner at arguably his most cosmopolitan, adapting the work of an English playwright he revered, altering the plot so that it ostensibly aligned with the ideological outlook of his German revolutionary colleagues, and setting it to music of a decidedly French and Italian flavour, all this in a way that still preserves many of the same, seemingly contradictory themes present in the original play.

Early Italian Opera Within the Labyrinths of Postmodernity

The article is focused on certain critical questions of the position of early Italian opera in contemporary culture. For a long time both performers and scholars considered it as an outdated genre meriting only historical interest. This state of affairs began to change in the 1970s, when a series of facsimiles prepared by Garland Publishing revealed a certain number of published opera scores and librettos. Over the past 50 years, three trends have emerged in the scholarly approach to early Italian operas. The first is that of deconstruction of the prevailing and largely erroneous stereotypes. The second is that of reconstruction, filling in the gaps of knowledge (compilation of encyclopedias, catalogues, works on the history of opera, and monographs about composers). The third is that of interpretation of the 17th- and 18th-century European musical and theatrical heritage in the context of culture and style. In this regard, a special position is held by the issue of performance interpretation. The postmodern era has transformed the early opera from an antique rarity into a topical musical and theatrical phenomenon. The dimension has opened up for directorial experiments aimed at projecting this genre onto the topical problems of today, bringing it closer to the perception of the mass of listeners – each and every one. The plotlines based on ancient myths and historical legends, conventional comedic and farcical situations referring to the earliest literary specimens are easily adapted to the realities of the modern theater: one convention becomes replaced by another, the wigs and camisoles of the 18th-century singers are replaced by army camouflage. Most of these productions provide interpretations not so much of the early opera as such, but particularly of us, bringing our own existential fears and ambitions onto the stage, playing on our political sympathies and antipathies. But there also exists an opposite side. It finds expression in the manner of singing and instrumental playing which comes close to the norms of three and four centuries ago, i.e., historical performing practice, which in our conditions is perceived by everyone as exquisite, designed for the refined taste of the elite, and in this sense of the “aristocratic” listener, rather than the general masses. Thus, in many cases there arises a combination, which is paradoxical in its essence – an unreasonable duality. Interpretation of the essence of early Italian opera is becoming acutely relevant as the path for this art to regain its previously lost artistic integrity.

Ntonation structure of early opera

Research objective is to consider the ways of development of the intonation structure of the opera of the late XVI – early XVIІ centuries as a set of intonation features sufficient to reflect abstract-contemplative and intense-sensitive, dramatic imagery, static and active stages of the dramatic development of a new theatrical genre. The research methodology is based on a historical and stylistic approach, in addition, the methods of system and intonation analysis are used, the comparative method is useful. Scientific novelty is determined by the inclusion of an understudied period of the development of Italian opera in the national scientific circulation, which, on the one hand, will supplement and correct the existing ideas about this phenomenon in musicological works, and, on the other hand, allow to see and emphasize new aspects of the intonation evolution of the early form of this genre. In addition, we can work on the butts of the singing operas of the XVI century – the beginning of the XVIІ century, to bring out the splendid moments that make the typological drawings of the opera like a genre. Conclusions. Тhe early opera, which in a fairly short period of time from the moment of its birth to the middle of the 17th century, evolved significantly, moved away from general theatrical patterns towards the formation of the logic of immanent-musical development; from the weight of the declamation, which obeyed the smallest shades of the word, to the generalized transfer of the meaning and feelings of the poetic text; from the emotionally colored intonation, which is characteristic of Florentine operas, to the principles of intonation generalization of emotions, which are formed in the work of K. Monteverdi. All of the listed modulation processes, as important for the approval of the key features of the opera genre, were accompanied by a movement towards the expansion of the imaginary world by musical drama. Recitative, as the main attribute that characterized the specifics of early opera, in its further development was pushed to the periphery of the musical side of the performance by more viable operatic forms, but at the same time it remained a significant component of the expression of the stage action. In this process, the logic of the musical and dramaturgical composition was connected with overcoming the fluidity of the recitative style, highlighting aria episodes with a rather high degree of certainty in it, as well as using elements of through development. In addition, it was usually built as a movement from the statics of the original situation (choral episodes) through its violation (recitative) to the consolidation of a new quality (arios and choral episodes).

Research on the Development of Early Opera in the Golden Age of the Netherlands

Research on the Development of Early Opera in the Golden Age of the Netherlands

An English Composer and Her Opera: Harriet Wainewright’s Comàla (1792)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses an opera by the English composer Harriet Wainewright (ca.1766-1843), namely Comàla, which received its premiere at the Hanover Square Rooms, London on January 26, 1792. The composer was from a Liverpool family of Wainwright (variable spelling). In her Critical Remarks on the Art of Singing (1836) she describes her musical ability as a young woman. Moving to London she cultivated an introduction to influential figures in society and attended opera performances, where the singing of stellar castrati such as Pachierotti or Marchesi fascinated her. Possessed of a fine soprano voice she studied harmony and counterpoint with John Worgan, an organist at Vauxhall Gardens. She decided to compose an opera herself and spent about a year writing Comàla, a dramatic tale from the poems of Ossian. But she was unable to find a theater in London that would stage the opera; it had to be performed as a concert piece, the lead roles being sung by Sophia Corri and James Bartleman. Critics, including Burney, were fulsome in their praise of the work, and Haydn’s publisher William Napier eventually brought out a full score in 1803. Disappointed at not securing staged performances of Comàla or her earlier opera (Don Quixote) Harriet left for India in 1796 where she married Col. John Stewart, an officer in the British Army (East India Company) in 1801. She had Comàla performed in Calcutta by amateurs, singing the main role herself. Returning to England as “Mrs. Col. Stewart” she continued to compose songs and choruses after her husband’s death in 1820. She died in London at the end of 1843.

‘La donna di poche parole’ from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera

ABSTRACT ‘Alle donne si addice il silenzio’: in early modern Italy these words aligned women’s public eloquence with wayward behaviour and their silence with chastity, thus generating significant and widespread debate. This essay traces how such considerations emerged across fiction and history in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s epic poems, and in early operatic representations of their siren-enchantresses: the Orlando furioso’s surprisingly speechless Alcina, and the Gerusalemme liberata’s loquaciously alluring Armida. The salvific qualities of Armida’s speech and song – her ‘vocal expression’, to follow Adriana Cavarero – influenced the development of female personalities on the seventeenth-century operatic stage. The performance practices analysed herein bring together threads of intertextuality and intermedial reception. Such interweaving of materials and modes in the construction of early opera’s musical poetics, which recalls the art of entrelacement, illustrates how poets, librettists, and composers transformed the complex coordination of agency and obstacles into which women – fictional and historical – were often embedded.

ОПЕРА ЭДИСОНА ДЕНИСОВА «ИВАН-СОЛДАТ»

The article gives a complete analysis of Edison Denisov's early opera "Ivan the Soldier". Some signs of the "new folklore wave" and early manifestations of the composer's future style are considered. In the 50s – 60s of the twentieth century, for man young Russian composers, turning to folklore was the only opportunity for self-expression and renewal of the musical language. In the second half of the twentieth century, the problem of saving the national in creativity is topical. The opera "Ivan the Soldier" attracts attention with its "non-perfomed" after its premiere in Tomsk more than half a century after its writing. Separately, it should be noted that there is no detailed analysis of "Ivan the Soldier" in professional literature, although this work unexpectedly shows us "another" Denisov: more "easy" to perceive, filled with folklore elements.

Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne

Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne Amy Dunagin (bio) When Italian opera first came to the English public stage in 1705, its reputation as a frivolous, luxurious, and potentially effeminizing entertainment preceded it.1 Five years before its debut, the dramatist John Dennis preemptively sowed the ground with salt.2 In the prologue to his play Iphigenia in 1700, he has the genius of England "rise to a warlike symphony" and relate the muse of Tragedy's exclamation: "Oh is my Brittain faln to that degree, / As for effeminate Arts t' abandon me? / I left the enslav'd Italian with disdain, / And servile Gallia, and dejected Spain: / Grew proud to be confin'd to Brittain's shore / Where godlike Liberty had fix'd before."3 Fearing a growing public taste for "those arts … that soften'd foreign braves, / And sunk the Southern nations into slaves," Dennis attempted to shame audiences by asking how England's past kings might have reacted "to see a bearded more than female throng / Dissolved and dying by an eunuchs song."4 In issuing this warning about the dangers of opera, Dennis capitalized on a longstanding set of beliefs about the genre's birthplace. The association of Italy with various sorts of what was considered sexual degeneracy, including lust, effeminacy, and sodomy, was by this time well established in English sources.5 To take just one example, in the same year, 1700, Daniel Defoe, in his well-known poem The True-Born Englishman, identified Italy as a "torrid zone," "where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy" and "nature ever [End Page 127] burns with hot desires, / Fanned with luxuriant air from subterranean fires."6 It is no surprise, then, that the trope of Italian licentiousness informed the public's reception of Italy's premier musico-dramatic export. From its first introduction in London theaters at the start of the eighteenth century, Italian opera provoked scathing responses from some English critics, who perceived a threat to their nation's masculinity.7 Critics of the opera argued that the spectacle and sensuality of Italian opera and the ambiguously sexed, or de-sexed, bodies of some of its star performers, the castrati, could have an effeminizing effect on individual British men and, even more troublingly, on British culture.8 Musicologists have noted that this gendering of Italian opera as feminine was completed in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—around the same time Italian opera was being introduced—and that it had to do not merely with the characteristics of opera itself, which had not been gendered in the same way in Italy, but also with opera's association with a place that the British were invested in viewing as feminine.9 These critiques of Italian opera as dangerously sensual and potentially effeminizing would be deployed against the genre for decades—in fact, centuries—to come. While some contemporaneous Continental opera criticism linked opera with effeminacy, early eighteenth-century English critics emphasized opera's supposed effeminizing, enervating effects with a unique intensity and alarm. Why should these characterizations of Italian opera have been particularly pronounced in England?10 This article argues that an important facet of the explanation for the gendering of Italian opera in England was early opera criticism's relationship to the fierce partisan debate over England's (after 1707, Britain's) involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession.11 Italian opera arrived in England at a particularly fraught time. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Britons contended with an era of hyper-partisanship during which Whigs and Tories vied for power, and partisan invective flowed from the pens of the era's most celebrated literary figures. In this hot political climate, the War of the Spanish Succession was the litmus test issue that most galvanized the two parties. In 1700, Whigs and Tories alike lamented the deathbed decision of the childless Spanish King Charles II to bequeath his throne to his grandnephew Philip, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. Both parties feared, not unreasonably, that this succession could tip the balance of power irrevocably in the French king's favor, and England consequently joined...

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Issue of Genre in Pekić's Early Opus

The paper presents the analysis of genre definition of Pekić’s prose. Genre definition of the prose work The time of miracles is mainly analysed and explained, which theoreticians define differently, determining it as a chain, stories, but also as a novel. The analysis of the corpus, that is, the works The time of miracles and New Jerusalem is conducted through the prism of Bakhtin’s theory on the novel, with a brief resistance of Lukacs’ theory to Bakhtin’s when it comes to the analysis of Pekić’s prose. After the explanation of the characterisation of The time of miracles as a novel, we deal with chronotope, as genre definition, where the most common chronotopes that we encounter in Pekić’s prose are indicated. The novelties that Pekić brings to Serbian literature are reflected in one complete novelistic image, a parallel world, documented by historical sources, the witness’ stories, archeological sites. Generally speaking, the central point of his work is occupied by problematising man’s position in the world in general – so, also in the past, present, but in the future as well. And precisely that and such his relation towards culture and existence – erudite, problematising, predictive, revealing – is “analogous to the correlations between chronotope within the work“ (Bakhtin, 1989, p. 386).

Epyllia and Epithalamia: Some Narrative Frames for Early Opera

ABSTRACT The first operas were often associated with princely wedding festivities, such as Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (Florence, 1600) or Claudio Monteverdi’s Arianna (Mantua, 1608). They formed part of a series of indoor and outdoor entertainments which, in turn, might plausibly be compared with the fresco cycles often commissioned to mark such nuptials. This also prompts reading them as epyllia, i.e. stories within the ‘story’ presented by their festivities as a whole. The concept is useful because their literary sources are usually themselves epyllia in an epithalamic context, as with Catullus’s Poem 64 on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Representing such embedded narratives further encouraged multiple allegories through intertextual association. Situating early opera in the context of the broader tropes of princely celebration further helped overcome one absurdity of the genre: the fact that people sing.

The Time-Space Dimension in mass and multifigure scenes of “Manon Lescaut” by G. Puccini

The Time-Space Dimension in mass and multifigure scenes of “Manon Lescaut” by G. Puccini

Специфика работы с текстами в ранних операх Тан Дуна. К проблеме обновления оперного жанра в творчестве американских композиторов на рубеже XX–XXI веков

The article examines the leading principles of the works for musical theater by Tan Dun – an important American composer of Chinese descent His operas have become brilliant and unique phenomena in the world musical culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The original interpretation of the opera genre presented in the composer’s musical oeuvres is based on an organic amalgam of the Eastern and Western musical-theatrical traditions, manifested in vocal techniques, which connect together elements of the Beijing, Kunju and Italian opera, in the specific sound and timbre generation, in regular compositional principles. The operatic legacy of Tan Dun also absorbs into itself traits of new musical-theatrical practices which have undergone development at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Their detailed study reveals the issue of the alteration of the role of the poetical text and dramaturgy in a theatrical performance. The early opera by Tan Dun examined in the present article demonstrates a special type of interaction between verbal and musical texts, which opens up new possibilities for dramaturgical and compositional solutions. The publication is prepared within the framework of scholarly project No. 17-04-00198-OGN\19 supported by the RFFI. Keywords: the opera theater of Tan Dun, revivification of the opera genre, interaction between music and drama, American composers.

Vom Adamsspiel zur Adamsoper

The thesis of the birth of opera as a result of late humanistic reception of anti­quity at the turn of the 17th century has been a commonplace idea within the discussion of dramatic genres. Yet the dominant narrative of change or renewal tends to obscure phenomena of continuity and anachronism which are nonetheless relevant for the tradition of premodern theatre. Those residues of an outlasting dramatic tradition are the focus of this paper which is especially concerned with the transitions between the broad stream of medieval liturgical drama and early modern opera. It is to be shown how close the ties in particular are between the new genre of music theatre and the older theatrical models and their continuities. At the same time the specific achievements and innovations of the younger operatic genre can be accentuated even more distinctly. This paper will concentrate on a paradigmatic case from the early times of German music theatre, the Hamburg inaugural opera Adam from 1678, to demonstrate the characteristic links as well as transformations between the traditions of the medieval liturgical and early modern protestant drama and the operatic genre of the 17th century.

Ferrante Pallavicino’s Venetian years and opera: a thwarted connection?

ABSTRACT Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–44) counts as one of the most controversial authors of his time. His manifold literary production includes many of the genres then en vogue, like poetic eulogies, novelle (short tales), polemical pamphlets, historiography and, above all, novels, of which he wrote around ten. Some of these novels may have been influential not only on other novelists, but also, indirectly, on a few opera libretti, although Ferrante himself did not author a single libretto. In fact, in many of his writings he airs a sharp contempt and antipathy towards singers and castrati in particular, the major protagonists of early opera. This aversion may have partly originated from a thwarted love affair and is clearly articulated in a few passages from his epistolary novel Il corriero svaligiato (1641) and, most provocatively, in his pseudo-rhetorical dialogue La retorica delle puttane (1642).