Stage & Scene

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Baroque opera featured lavish staging, spectacle and excitement. Stages were given added depth to allow for greater perspective and more vivid scenic effects. Steps were built leading from the stage into the auditorium, bringing the audience closer to the action. The ‘chariot and pole’ device enabled scene changes to be made in seconds. 15 or 20 scene changes could be involved. Candles, torches and smoke depicted blazing hellfire or provided ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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A libretto – Italian for ‘small book’ – enabled audiences to read the words of an opera or, in the case of a foreign language, a translation. Some of the earliest libretti were quite substantial in size, around 21.6 cm. However, they were not too unwieldy and were read by members of the audience, in confined seating space, while the performance was going on. The auditoriums of opera houses and ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The commedia dell’arte, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century, was a forerunner of opera. The influence of commedia dell’arte was evident in both the cast lists and the plots of operas. There were, for example, slapstick sequences called zanni and comic servants, an elderly parent or guardian, usually named Pantalone, and his faithful sidekick Il dottore Gratiano. The beautiful but despairing heroine was usually involved in an unsuitable ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Although early eighteenth-century operas were unashamedly designed to exploit the virtuosity of expensive singers, they were also regarded as an opportunity to fuse all the arts, in which the librettist’s poetry and the composer’s music were complemented by sumptuous costumes and scenery painted by master craftsmen. The mechanical wings in Baroque theatre allowed swift scene changes that could surprise and entertain an audience visually, and inventive designers produced astonishing mechanical ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The ‘doctrine of the affections’ was the main theory for the design of opera in the eighteenth century. Its name was not coined until the twentieth century, but the ideas behind it were discussed in the writings of theorists such as Johann Mattheson (1681–1764). These ideas were put into practice on stage by the famous librettists Zeno and, in the following generation, Metastasio. The doctrine defined specific ‘affections’ or emotions, ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Two crucial figures in Gluck’s operatic career were the controller of the Viennese theatres Count Durazzo and the Francophile poet and librettist Raniero de’ Calzabigi. Both were intent on the reform and revitalization of Italian opera. In Gluck they found their perfect musical collaborator. Some of Gluck’s Italian stage works had already begun to integrate solos and chorus, but it was in his three Italian ‘reform’ operas – Orfeo, Alceste and ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The artistry, ingenuity and creativity of Pierre Cicéri (1782–1868), the greatest designer in early nineteenth-century France, made him an almost legendary figure in the world of Romantic opera. Originally, Cicéri trained as a singer, but turned to painting and became an assistant at the Paris Opéra in 1806. When he graduated to stage design, he made use of the latest technological innovations, for example using gaslight for Isouard’s Aladin, ou ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Spectacle and optical illusion were involved in opera stage settings from the start. Even the comparatively intimate Baroque operas, while musically ‘balanced’ and ‘restrained’, relied heavily on visuals. In Romantic opera, the music itself acquired more drama and more atmosphere so that stage settings had to increase their impact to match. In Italy, for example, cunning use of backdrops and receding arches made the stage appear deeper than it really ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
209 Words Read More

Throughout his long career, Verdi worked with several librettists and gained a reputation for being something of a tartar. Sometimes he would even write the text himself, only allowing his librettist to put it into verse. The composer had strong ideas about what he wanted from the text to his operas; in the early compositions this was a dramatic series of confrontations, perfectly set by Temistocle Solera in Nabucco, I ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Opera censorship was a fact of life for nineteenth-century composers and librettists. Libretti were minutely picked over for anything that might give offence, encourage sedition or create public disorder. Censors even attended dress rehearsals to make sure there was no ‘improper’ scenery, costumes or stage business. The Spaniards, Austrians and French who occupied Italy at various times suspected the natives of sedition, rebellion or worse and fancied that they were ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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No discussion of this period in opera’s history would be complete without looking at Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Although he is known primarily for his expansive, neurotically tinged symphonies and orchestral song cycles, he contributed hugely to the development of opera through his work as a conductor. Mahler was born in 1860 and he began his conducting career at Bad Hall, Austria in 1880. Moving between posts in places such as Laibach ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
213 Words Read More

Now an accepted part of going to any opera house, one of the more controversial additions to opera during the twentieth century was that of ‘supertitles’, the projection of a translation of the libretto to help audience members to understand the words that are being sung. Although supertitles are usually projected above the stage – antagonizing some lighting designers who are concerned about the light bleeding onto the stage and ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
247 Words Read More
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