Claudio Monteverdi was a great innovator who achieved the quantum leap of musical style that largely freed opera from its Medieval and religious origins. To achieve this, he broke some rules, put his own interpretations on others and made changes that, in seventeenth-century terms, were revolutionary. The recitative, for example, was already an established pattern ...
, who took his text from the annals of the ancient Roman historian Tacitus (ad 55–120). The opera received its first performance in Venice in 1643. Poppea was written when Monteverdi was 76 and, by the standards of the seventeenth century, a very old man. Comparisons have been made with Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), who wrote his last opera, ...
‘Orpheus, a Legend in Music’ L’Orfeo, favola in musica consists of a prologue and five acts – a prolonged performance for its time. Monteverdi used several devices to extend the action of the opera. He wrote recitatives to be performed between the duets, as well as polyphonic madrigals, of which he was a master. Further additions included ...
1567–1643, Italian Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was born in Cremona and began his illustrious career as a choirboy in the town’s cathedral. By the time he was 20, he had already published the first of his eventual nine books of secular madrigals. He was also a skilled composer of motets. Monteverdi’s horizons expanded in 1591 when he joined the ...
(Klou’-dyo Mon-ta-ver’-de) 1567–1643 Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi stands as one of the last great composers of the Renaissance and one of the first of the Baroque. He studied composition with the madrigalist Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1547–92) in his home town of Cremona. When he took his first professional post in his mid-twenties, he had already published six books of music and ...
, as was the violin, which was rapidly replacing the viol as the preferred string instrument, because of its greater volume and expressive range. The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) wrote virtuoso music for both instruments in his 1607 opera, Orfeo, and Italian composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli (1557–1612) wrote for trumpets in this way within their ...
(overblowing). Early Recorder Music By the sixteenth century, the recorder was one of the most popular instruments in Europe. It was used in instrumental and vocal music by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1645–1704), Henry Purcell (1659–95), George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Perhaps more significant, though, was its use among amateurs. ...
The most widely used tuned percussion in early twentieth-century classical music are the timpani. These instruments, often called ‘kettledrums’, are metal hemispheres with a tense membrane (formerly leather, now plastic) across the top and are tuned to play a single note. An instrument with military origins (as the timpani/trumpets combination in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, 1607, reminds us), timpani ...
music. During the seventeenth century – perhaps due to its burnished and melancholy timbre – the trombone developed an association with death and the underworld, a link that Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) put to good use in L’Orfeo (1607). Interest in the instrument declined, however, and by the eighteenth century it had almost disappeared. The Eighteenth Century It was ...
century. Retaining its ecclesiastical associations, the trombone was used to symbolize the afterlife, the descent into Purgatory or Hell. That had been its role in Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), and in similar vein it can be found in Mozart’s sacred works, notably in the ‘Tuba Mirum’ of his Requiem. But perhaps the decisive reason why the trombone ...
the means of creating a permanent archive. We take for granted the abundance of music that does survive – until we realize that, say, in the case of Monteverdi, the great majority of his opera scores have been lost. The three extant works are so fine that the loss of so many others must rank as a cultural ...
b. 1933 English mezzo-soprano Baker studied in London, and made her debut in Smetana’s The Secret in Oxford in 1956. She sang Handel roles early in her career, and made a particular impression as Purcell’s Dido, a role she recorded several times. At Covent Garden, where she first appeared as Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ...
b. 1943 English conductor Gardiner founded the Monteverdi Choir in 1964 and the Monteverdi Orchestra in 1968, when he conducted the Monteverdi Vespers at the Promenade Concerts in London. He was artistic director of the Göttingen Handel Festival 1981–90 and music director of the Lyons Opera 1983–88. He has given many performances of French Baroque opera, including the first ...
and the Symphony with Chaconne (1985–86). In the mid-1990s he reached back further into the Baroque period for inspiration with Arianna, a recomposition of a lost opera by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). Recommended Recording: Piano Concerto, op. 33, Peter Serkin, London Sinfonietta (cond) Oliver Knussen (NMC) Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Henryk Górecki | Contemporary | ...
c. 1620–c. 1660, Italian Singer Anna Renzi created the part of Ottavia, the neglected wife of Emperor Nero in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, in 1642, and she sang many other operatic roles in Venice. Renzi was one of the first female opera singers and also one of the first, if not the first, singers to ...
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