A castrato was a male singer whose boyish singing voice was preserved by castrating him before his voice changed during puberty. The castrato had an important part to play in the performance of opera, since women were barred from performing on stage and the male soprano or contralto was employed instead. If anything, a castrato’s voice was the more effective, since castration did not entirely eliminate maleness. This was especially ...
Meistersinger (the singular and plural forms are identical) were German men predominantly from the lower and middle classes who were members of town guilds formed to encourage the composition and performance of songs known as Meisterlieder. The genre had its origins in the fourteenth century and flourished for three centuries. It was essentially an oral tradition: not all Meistersinger could read music, so they relied on learning their songs by ...
The revolution in opera that came about in the Baroque period required singers to acquire new techniques and disciplines. The idea was to elicit a greater emotional response from opera audiences, hold their attention and engage them more fully in the plot and its characters. One way these aims could be achieved was through judicious use of vocal ornamentation, such as vibrato. Singing vibrato required a singer to make the ...
Although researchers continue to make discoveries about the way music was performed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, little is known about one of its most crucial aspects: how did singers actually sound? Many medieval theorists and writers mention performers with voices ‘like those of angels’, and words such as ‘sweetness’ occur again and again; equally, the same authors criticize others for ‘braying like asses’. But although such remarks ...
A da capo aria is a simple formula dictated by the two-part organization of an aria’s libretto text. Its mood could vary between rage, jealousy, despair or joy, according to the demands of the location of the plot. The singer’s text can either directly describe their predicament, or take the form of a simile that has allegorical relevance to the course they must pursue. The first section in which a character ...
What distinguishes Peri’s Euridice from other musical dramas staged at the time, and allows it to claim the status of the first opera, is the composer’s use of a new style of singing, intended to imitate speech in song. It was partly the outcome of attempts to recreate the direct and expressive declamation of ancient Greek and Roman dramas, and partly the natural progress of composers seeking to express themselves ...
Castration was only the first ordeal that boys with musical potential endured. The brutal operation did not guarantee that the boy would develop a pleasing musical voice, and must have brought only misery to those whose singing ability was insufficient to allow them to study at prestigious music conservatoires such as the four major schools at Naples. For the luckier boys, conditions were often harsh and far removed from the ...
With the arrival of the new musical drama in the Baroque era, the voice became one of the most powerful instruments in the musical repertory during this period and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in France. Under Louis XIV, who took full power in 1661 and reigned until 1715, France experienced a renaissance of artistic and literary activity. The great palace of Versailles was begun in 1662, its gardens laid ...
Opera was essentially an Italian genre: it had been born in Florence, come to its first maturity in Venice and developed next in Naples and Rome. However, Italian art of all sorts was admired across Europe, and opera soon took root in France, Austria, Germany, England and Spain, even in distant Sweden and Russia. At first this was Italian opera, particularly in the courtly establishments where this luxury entertainment could be ...
The greater drama and intensity, the expanding orchestras and the trend for larger opera houses that marked the early Romantic era placed pressure on singers to increase their voice power to match. A larger opera house, seating more people and employing more orchestral musicians than before, meant a bigger space for voices to fill and greater competition from the accompaniment. The bel canto singing style of the eighteenth century, while ...
The failure of Peter Cornelius’s The Barber of Baghdad was not due to lack of charm or talent – the opera contained both in plenty – but to a small, vociferous group of reactionary musicians who objected to the influence of Franz Liszt and his ‘New German School’. The ethos of the New German School was to foster the work of ‘progressive’ composers who experimented with new harmonies and regarded ...
From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, heroic roles were generally composed for castratos: male sopranos or altos who had been castrated before puberty to preserve their high voice. Throughout the Baroque and classical eras castratos were common on the stage. They disappeared, however, in the early nineteenth century as the practice of castration for musical purposes was deemed barbaric, though they were kept on in the choir of the ...
On Rossini’s advice, the already established tenor Adolphe Nourrit (1802–39) took singing lessons in order to acquire an Italianate flexibility of tone. His subsequent performance in the premiere of Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe at the Paris Opéra in 1826 was a triumph, and in the same year he was made principal tenor of the Opéra. He appeared in each new work, including Le Comte Ory (1828) and Guillaume Tell ...
The term convenienze – ‘conveniences’ – described the hierarchy of singers in nineteenth-century Italian opera and the etiquette surrounding their participation. The three main principals were the soprano or prima donna – first lady – the tenor or primo uomo – first man – and the baritone or basso cantante – lower or bass singer. Under the Code Rossini, the formal structure of opera that applied between around 1815 and ...
Through a long history of tradition, the language of opera is Italian. The early history of the art-form is rooted in the language – Mozart’s greatest operas are set to Italian librettos – and the wealth of Italian opera composers in the early nineteenth century (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Cherubini, Spontini, Mercadante) is testimony to the richness of the tradition. But gradually composers of other nationalities, most notably German, began to ...
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