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Parker, Mary Ann, Ellen T. Harris, and Handel. "The Librettos of Handel's Operas." Notes 47, no. 4 (1991): 1120. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/941628.
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[方博], Fang Bo. "The Transtextual Gender Construction in the Opera Madame White Snake." ASIAN-EUROPEAN MUSIC RESEARCH JOURNAL 7 (June 21, 2021): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.30819/aemr.7-1.
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The opera Madame White Snake (hereafter Madame), co-commissioned by Opera Boston and Beijing Music Festival, premiered at Boston Cutler Majestic Theater in February 2010. It was the first commissioned opera by Opera Boston.1 Based on the story from the famous Chinese ancient myth Bai She Zhuan 2 (in Chinese: 白蛇传), this opera’s libretto was created by a Singaporean American librettist, who has shed the story’s “traditional skin and taking on modern trappings” (Smith, 2019: 27) on purpose. When sniffing at male librettists’ discourses about female characters’ vulnerable and tragic lives in their operas, opera Madame’s initiator and librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs argues that women should seize the initiative to make their own decisions in life. The white snake, in her mind, ought to be a whole woman who is powerful and demonic, and yet, is also nurturing and caring, is capable of deep and intense love. In the first section of this article, I introduce the original legend’s background and the story outline in its operatic adaptation; I also trace back the opera’s commissioning process. After providing the background information of the story and the operatic version, then, in the second section I analyze the opera in terms of its transtextual figural gender construction in her characterization through comparative studies of the white and green snakes’ images from the sources of literary works, traditional xiqu scripts and operatic librettos. Referring to Lim’s personal growth and migrating history, as well as she and her husband co-founded charitable foundation’s missions and its recent IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) opera grant program partnering with Opera America, I aim to examine her gender construction of the “female” roles in the opera from the perspectives of feminism, interracial marriage; and heterosexual, transsexual, and homosexual relationships.
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Miklaszewska, Joanna. "Inspiracje Moniuszkowskie w muzyce XX wieku. Opera Pomsta Jontkowa Bolesława Wallek Walewskiego." Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, sectio L – Artes 15, no. 1 (2017): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/l.2017.15.1.59.
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<p>Bolesław Wallek Walewski był jedną z czołowych postaci krakowskiego życia muzycznego w okresie międzywojennym. Do jego najwybitniejszych dzieł należy opera <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em>, której libretto jest kontynuacją <em>Halki</em> Stanisława Moniuszki. W artykule scharakteryzowano muzyczne związki pomiędzy obu operami, widoczne m.in. we wprowadzeniu przez Wallek Walewskiego cytatów motywów z <em>Halki</em>, a także wskazano różnice stylistyczne między obydwoma dziełami. Wyznaczają je trzy elementy: warstwa językowa librett, główne założenia dramaturgiczne oraz styl muzyczny. Libretto <em>Halki</em> napisane zostało przez W. Wolskiego bez aluzji do elementów gwarowych, natomiast B. Wallek Walewski w libretcie <em>Pomsty Jontkowej</em> wykorzystał w szerokim zakresie gwarę podhalańską. W przeciwieństwie do <em>Halki</em>, osią dramatu Wallek Walewskiego jest motyw zemsty górala na możnych panach. Styl muzyczny opery Walewskiego wykazuje pokrewieństwo z muzyką Wagnera, z nurtem muzycznego folkloryzmu (poprzez nawiązanie do folkloru podhalańskiego), oraz impresjonizmu. W artykule poruszono ponadto problem recepcji dzieła. <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> była najbardziej znanym i często wystawianym w Polsce dziełem operowym krakowskiego kompozytora. Jej prapremiera odbyła się w Teatrze Wielkim w Poznaniu w 1926 roku. Na przełomie lat dwudziestych i trzydziestych opera ta cieszyła się w Polsce dużą popularnością, wystawiły ją także inne teatry operowe w kraju (z wyjątkiem sceny warszawskiej). Po II wojnie światowej <em>Pomstę Jontkową</em> wystawiła Opera Wrocławska.</p><p>SUMMARY</p><p>Born in Lvov but fi rst of all associated with the musical circles in Krakow, Bolesław Wallek Walewski (1885-1944) referred to one of Stanisław Moniuszko’s most famous operas – <em>Halka</em> [Helen] – when composing his own opera Pomsta Jontkowa [Jontek’s Vengeance] (1924). The contemporaries regarded Halka and Pomsta Jontkowa as a series. Both operas share common elements: <em>Halka</em> (Warsaw version) and <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> are four-act operas, the same characters appear in their librettos (Jontek, Zofia), and in both works the confl icts between the gentry and the peasants are highly important. The musical connections between the operas are evidenced by Walewski’s use of the leading motifs. Moreover, both in <em>Halka</em> and in <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em>, there are highlanders’ dances. Walewski also includes melodies from Halka into his work.</p><p>The principal difference between the two operas is determined by three elements: the language of the librettos, the main dramatic assumptions, and the musical style. The libretto of <em>Halka</em> was written by Włodzimierz Wolski (1824-1882) without references to dialectal elements whereas Walewski liberally used the Podhale highlanders’ dialect in his libretto. Moreover, unlike <em>Halka</em>, which emphasizes the personal experiences of the main heroine and social confl icts, the axis of Walewski’s drama is the motif of the highlander’s revenge on the wealthy lords. The musical style of <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> shows, on the one hand, a similarity with Richard Wagner’s music (harmony, instrumentation, and the way of treatment of leitmotifs), while on the other – a similarity to the trend of musical folklorism and impressionism. An innovative idea is the combination of impressionist features with the stylization of highlanders’ folklore.</p><p><em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> was the best known opera of the Krakow composer in Poland in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and at the same time it was one of the most original Polish operas of the interwar period. It combines traditional elements with modern ones, and it is an expression of the late inspirations by Wagnerian music and esthetics in Polish music, as well as referring to the best traditions of the Polish national opera.</p>
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Gallarati, Paolo. "Music and masks in Lorenzo Da Ponte's Mozartian librettos." Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 3 (1989): 225–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700003013.
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In his trilogy of masterpieces composed to texts by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart radically changed the musical and theatrical nature of Italian opera. The dramma giocoso became a true ‘comedy in music’ through the use of psychological realism: a vivid representation of life in continuous transformation and in all its naked immediacy is now the real protagonist of the story, an all-embracing totality within which each character represents a separate feature. This influx of a non-rationalist sense of life into the classical proportions of sonata form (whose tonal relationships and free approach to thematic development controlled the vocal set pieces) made for an explosive mixture. Even before his collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart himself seemed well aware of his uniqueness: ‘I guarantee that in all the operas which are to be performed until mine [L'oca del Cairo] is finished, not a single idea will resemble one of mine.’
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Sparti, Barbara. "HERCULES DANCING IN THEBES, IN PICTURES AND MUSIC." Early Music History 26 (October 2007): 219–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261127907000253.
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A general assumption persists among musicologists and dance historians that dance in seventeenth-century operas was a French phenomenon, with Italians only occasionally staging a final ballo. In large part the assumption is the result of lack of information concerning dance in seventeenth-century opera, due, particularly in comparison with other periods, to limited source material and limited research. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that when Italian operas included balli at the end of one or more acts, dance indications in the librettos tended to be brief, and the dance music appeared only rarely in scores.
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CHEN, JEN-YEN. "MARIA THERESIA AND THE ‘CHINESE’ VOICING OF IMPERIAL SELF: THE AUSTRIAN CONTEXTS OF METASTASIO'S CHINA OPERAS." Eighteenth Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 11–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570615000408.
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ABSTRACTPietro Metastasio's two librettos featuring ostensibly Chinese subject matter, Le cinesi (1735, revised 1749) and L'eroe cinese (1752), came into being during a period of crisis in the Holy Roman Empire, as the reigning Habsburg dynasty confronted a war of succession motivated by resistance to the Empress Maria Theresia's accession to the throne. This article investigates how Austria envisioned China and how this was used to voice notions of rightful political legitimacy at a time of grave threat to the continuance of a long-standing ruling house. It argues that idealized traits of the Chinese other such as loyalty, deference and wisdom furnished the basis for a reflexive critique that helped to bolster and renew a native imperial self. This stance of ‘dialogic monologism’ towards a foreign culture emerges in a detailed examination of the textual style of the two librettos, the musical characteristics of the settings performed in or near Vienna around the middle of the eighteenth century and the conditions of sponsorship of these performances.
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Garzonio, Stefano. "Механизмы переложения "на наши (русские) нравы" итальянских оперных либретто [Mechanisms of adaptation “to our (Russian) customs” of Italian opera librettos]". Sign Systems Studies 30, № 2 (2002): 629–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sss.2002.30.2.16.
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Mechanisms of adaptation “to our (Russian) customs” of Italian opera librettos. The paper deals with the history of poetical translation of Italian musical poetry in the 18th century Russia. In particular, it is focused on the question of pereloženie na russkie nravy, the adaptation to national Russian customs, of Italian opera librettos, cantatas, arias, songs and so on. The author points out three different phases of this process. The first phase, in the 1730s, coincides with the reign of Anna Ioannovna and it is linked to Trediakovsky’s translations of Italian intermezzos, comedies and to the first opera seria, La forza dell’amore e dell’odio (‘The force of love and hate’, 1736) by F. Araja and F. Prata; the second phase, in the period 1740–1770s, is characterized by a very varied production of translations and imitations, which undoubtedly influenced the general developing of Russian musical and dramatic poetry. It is during this period that pereloženie na russkie nravy is introduced into dramatic genres and sometimes it is findable in musical poetry as well. The third phase, in the 1780–1790s, is linked with the activity of such poets-translators as Ivan Dmitrevskij, Michail Popov, Vasilij Levšin and is characterized by the new practice of performing operas in Russian translations. In the paper the different forms of pereloženie na russkie nravy are pointed out, starting from the formal niveau of metrics and stylistics up to the adaptation of themes, places and realia.
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BELLINI, ALICE. "MUSIC AND ‘MUSIC’ IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY META-OPERATIC SCORES." Eighteenth Century Music 6, no. 2 (2009): 183–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570609990030.
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ABSTRACT‘Meta-operas’, that is, operas portraying the world of opera and its protagonists (such as impresarios, music directors, librettists and virtuosi), became increasingly common during the eighteenth century. Most of the scholarly literature on meta-opera, however, concentrates on the operas' poetic texts, their librettos. Scholars have dealt with these operas about operas almost as though they were spoken dramas, without taking into account the many ways in which metatheatrical practices and conventions are made more complex by the presence of music.What do meta-operatic scores look like? Are they similar to other ‘ordinary’ scores of the same time, or do their metatheatrical techniques set them aside as special? Considering a number of eighteenth-century works, this article points out how specific musical means can contribute to the overall effect of meta-operatic plots: the stratified nature of meta-narratives is, in fact, mirrored in the scores when realistic music is performed on stage. On these occasions, the presence of more than one layer of musical performance (of music and ‘music’) can be detected in the score. Furthermore, the presence of realistic music allows for a highly flexible treatment of standard operatic practices, and a number of passages work across conventional oppositions such as recitative/closed number, ‘real-life’/‘performed’ and ‘spoken’/‘sung’. Meta-operas, therefore, offer a special perspective on the presence of realistic music in opera.
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Muir, Edward. "Why Venice? Venetian Society and the Success of Early Opera." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, no. 3 (2006): 331–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002219506774929854.
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Why did opera first succeed as a public art form in Venice between 1637 and 1650 when all the elements of the new form were fully evident? The answer is to be found in the conjunction between Venetian carnival festivity and the intellectual politics of Venetian republicanism during the two generations after the lifting of the papal interdict against Venice in 1607. During this extraordinary period of relatively free speech, which was unmatched elsewhere at the time, Venice was the one place in Italy open to criticisms of Counter Reformation papal politics. Libertine and skeptical thought flourished in the Venetian academies, the members of which wrote the librettos and financed the theaters for many of the early Venetian operas.
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Rice, John A. "The Staging of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes as Seen by a Cellist in the Orchestra." Cambridge Opera Journal 26, no. 1 (2014): 65–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586713000335.
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AbstractDuring the 1780s a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra, known only as Monsieur Hivart, served the Russian Count Nicholas Sheremetev as an operatic agent, sending scores, librettos, costume designs, stage designs and other materials related to opera in Paris, and advising the count on the production of French operas in Russia. Hivart was in contact with such composers as Grétry, Sacchini and Piccinni, and the stage machinist and ballet master of the Opéra, and from his place in the orchestra he could watch their work take shape on stage. This gives his letters to Sheremetev (published in Russian translation in 1944 but largely unknown in the West) significant value for historians of opera in eighteenth-century Paris. Especially extensive are Hivart’s reports on the first production of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes, which contain much information about the first production available nowhere else.
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Albrecht-Hohmaier, Martin, Berthold Over, Emilia Pelliccia, and Sonia Wronkowska. "Pasticcio-Daten und Daten-Pasticcio – zur Edition kompilierter musikalischer Werke." editio 34, no. 1 (2020): 45–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/editio-2020-0004.
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AbstractThis text, which was written by members of the project Pasticcio. Ways of arranging attractive operas, uses Gérard Genette’s term ‘paratext’ in a broader sense. Assuming that every text besides the edited work, which is part of the genesis of these oscillating works compiled of pre-existing musical material called pasticcios, can be understood as a paratext, it reveals the importance of printed librettos, related musical sources and philological contexts (like the often underestimated influence of the singers in the creation of a musical work) for their understanding and edition. Aiming at connecting a database with the online edition of four operatic works via XML, the project members present ideas and structures of the project’s data which can be described as a paratext as well.
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VAN DER LINDEN, HUUB. "EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORATORIO REFORM IN PRACTICE: APOSTOLO ZENO REVISES A FLORENTINE LIBRETTO." Eighteenth Century Music 16, no. 1 (2019): 31–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570618000337.
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ABSTRACTAlthough the circulation and revision of Italian opera librettos is a well-known aspect of musical life in eighteenth-century Europe, the practice has hardly been touched upon with regard to the Italian oratorio of the same period. Librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) worked in and theorized about both genres, yet his involvement with the oratorio has been little studied. This article addresses three editions of an oratorio libretto by Domenico Canavese. Following versions for Florence (1712) and Pistoia (1714), a third appeared in 1726 in conjunction with a Lenten performance at the Imperial Court Chapel in Vienna. An annotated copy of the 1712 edition from Zeno's library shows that he revised the text for the Viennese performance. His textual changes – some small, some radical – reveal practical, stylistic and dramaturgical concerns. A comparison of the annotated copy with the printed libretto for the 1726 performance and the principal musical source for the new setting by Giuseppe Porsile shows that Zeno's revisions were scrupulously followed.
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Cividini, Iacopo. "Paratext oder paralleler Text?" editio 34, no. 1 (2020): 72–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/editio-2020-0005.
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AbstractIn intertextuality studies, libretto is generally regarded as a paratext on the fringes of the opera performance. However, the extension of Gérard Genette’s concept of paratextuality to this medium does not fully acknowledge its essential contribution to the production of meaning during the opera performance. Based on the definition of theatre performance as plurality of simultaneous sign systems and by the example of the libretti to Mozart’s operas edited at the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, the essay proposes an alternative semiotic concept of libretto as parallel text. This means an optional sign system that generates aesthetic content parallel to the other sign systems of the opera. In the context of this new intertextual definition of libretto, the digital medium proves to be particularly suitable for a libretto edition that serves both scholarly and practical purposes.
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Saccenti, Edoardo, and Leonardo Tenori. "Multivariate modeling of the collaboration between Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa for the librettos of three operas by Giacomo Puccini." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30, no. 3 (2014): 405–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu006.
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Emerson, Caryl. "Back to the future: Shostakovich's revision of Leskov's ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District’." Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 1 (1989): 59–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700002767.
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‘Librettology’ has begun to acquire a working vocabulary. Critics now investigate the relationship between a libretto and its literary source in terms other than fidelity; a text adapted for musical setting no longer disappears from the realm of the ‘literary’. Historians and musicologists are considering the role of opera librettos in cultural history, with special attention to librettos that rework historical, national or mythic themes. How operatic texts transpose and thus ‘re-accent’ a nation's literary classics is emerging as a fruitful and still unexplored field.
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Burden, Michael. "Dancers at London's Italian Opera Houses as Recorded in the Libretti." Dance Research 33, no. 2 (2015): 159–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/drs.2015.0137.
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For the audience, the purchase of a libretto when attending the King's Theatre, London's elite house for foreign opera and dance, was a commonplace. It offered the text of the opera, and a parallel English translation; it could also contain an argument for the opera, and other material relevant to the performance. A dramatis personae was nearly always included, together with a cast list, and after the mid-century, the libretti often contained the names of the dancers and choreographers. This article sets out to document the mentions of these names, and to chart their inclusion in the context of the history of the libretto. It identifies the first inclusion of a choreographer's name (in Antigono, in May 1746), the first dancers (in Ipermestra, in November 1754), and the first leader of the dancers (in the libretti for the 1790–1791 season), and identifies the inexplicable tailing off, and then total omission, of dancer personnel from the London Italian opera libretti.
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Stenzl, Jürg. "York Höller's ‘The Master and Margarita’: A German Opera." Tempo, no. 179 (December 1991): 8–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200061337.
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1 ‘Literaturoper’: Literary Opera and the ‘problem of opera’Right up to the end of the 19th century, an opera libretto was conceived differently from a stage play. This was because, from the outset, the libretto was thought out and constructed with a view to being set to music and sung. The librettist, whether he was writing in Italian or French, had to respect the conventions of this particular literary genre, conventions that were derived from a specific type of musical drama comprised of an alternation between recitatives (action) and arias or ensembles (tableaux). The use of specific lines and rhymes made the libretto into a ‘pre-composition’, and gave the composer an architectural plan to follow.
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Avram, Cristi. "Pelléas and Mélisande – Maurice Maeterlinck and the Opera Performance. 2018 Retrospective." Theatrical Colloquia 9, no. 1 (2019): 163–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/tco-2019-0003.
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Abstract The road from the theatre text towards the opera performance is an attempt to essentialize words which unravel in order to ease the communication between the characters and the playwrights’ message. This endeavor is very difficult, as the play which stands at the root of the libretto already operates with an essentialization. Anyhow, the libretto cannot have the length of a play, but appends a musical dimension to the production. These things apply to Pelléas And Mélisande by Claude Debussy, built on the same text written by Maurice Maeterlinck. This article, although oriented towards an operatic retrospective of the year 2018 of the great musical stages of the world, also follows this libretto’s journey on these stages. Furthermore, 2018 marks the centenary of Claude Dubussy’s death.
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BURDEN, MICHAEL, and CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO. "A MOVABLE FEAST: THE ARIA IN THE ITALIAN LIBRETTO IN LONDON BEFORE 1800." Eighteenth Century Music 4, no. 2 (2007): 285–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570607000954.
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The purpose of this short essay is to announce a new research project, ‘The Aria in the Italian Libretto in London before 1800’, the aim of which is to list the incipits of all the arias included in Italian-language opera and oratorio librettos printed in London before the turn of the nineteenth century. The notion that an opera libretto may not be the stable text it appears on the page to be is no news to scholars working on opera and musical theatre, who understand perfectly well the possible nature and origins of the sources they use, especially the libretto. At least one hopes they do; but in the case of the last, do they? The seductive lure of the printed page is strong, a lure which has an almost irresistible pull for scholars when there is a score to ‘match’; it becomes even stronger when those working on canonic composers stray out of their chosen territory to look for ‘contemporaneous examples’ from the works of ‘minor composers’, or when there is no thematic catalogue to provide even a basic chart with which to navigate the treacherous waters of the output of even some major eighteenth-century ones. A libretto is, after all, not ‘music’, they say – ‘that’s all very well, but why aren’t you talking about the music?’ – so why worry? Just hurry on to the matching score to identify the ‘composer’s intentions’, and all will be well.
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Betzwieser, Thomas. "Exoticism and politics: Beaumarchais' and Salieri's Le Couronnement de Tarare (1790)." Cambridge Opera Journal 6, no. 2 (1994): 91–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700004195.
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Not least because of its librettist, Tarare (1787) ranks among the most interesting ‘reform’ operas of the eighteenth century. The work was by no means unique among such efforts at the Académie Royale de Musique, but it undoubtedly had the greatest impact after the Piccinni controversy at the end of the 1770s, in part because Beaumarchais was untiring in his efforts to promote the new opera – a task at which he was far superior to his librettistic colleagues. He presented his new operatic conception in a detailed preface to the libretto (‘Aux Abonnés de l'Opéra’), the central point of which was to emphasise the mixture of conventional genre traditions, in particular of serious and comic elements.
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Poltavets, Margarita Aleksandrovna. "The history of creation of libretto to the opera “The Demon” by A. Rubinstein based on the text of eponymous poem of M. Y. Lermontov." Litera, no. 1 (January 2021): 144–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2021.1.32097.
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The subject of this research is the history of creation of libretto to the opera &ldquo;The Demon&rdquo; by A. Rubinstein based on the text of eponymous poem of M. Y. Lermontov. The object of this research is the text of libretto written over the period from the end of 1870 to 1871. The article examines the stages of creation of the opera, which involved Y. P. Polonsky, A. N. Maykov, P. A. Viskovatov, and A. G. Rubinstein. The article presents the previously unknown facts of working on the text, and considers the question of possible attribution of the text. The research employs historical-literary and hermeneutical methods, which allow to systematically trace the teamwork of authors on the text of libretto. The conclusion is made that the composer took part in in creation of the text along with the librettist, which is testified in correspondence and memoirs of the contemporaries, namely the reminiscences of P. A. Viskovatov. The question of authorship of the text of libretto remains relevant.
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Simonton, Dean Keith. "The Music or the Words? Or How Important is the Libretto for an Opera's Aesthetic Success?" Empirical Studies of the Arts 18, no. 2 (2000): 105–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/xyf7-juuh-hedy-2e88.
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What are the comparative contributions of composer and librettist to the aesthetic impact of great operas? This question was empirically answered using a sample of 911 operas by fifty-nine composers. The aesthetic success of each opera was gauged by a composite measure that included performance and recording frequencies as well as archival indicators. The predictor variables were both idiographic (e.g., the specific identities of the librettists and the literary sources) and nomothetic (e.g., literary genre, language, librettist's age, and experience). After introducing appropriate control variables, the multiple-regression analyses demonstrated that composers play a much bigger role in determining operatic impact than do librettists or their libretti. The identity of the composers alone accounted for almost half of the variance in aesthetic success. As far as opera is concerned, the music is aesthetically more crucial than are the words.
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Panasiuk, Valerii. "«La Traviata» remastered. G. Verdi’s opera in the stage interpretation by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko." Aspects of Historical Musicology 21, no. 21 (2020): 63–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-21.04.
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The historical evidence of the XX – the beginning of the ХХІ century musical theatre proves that the drastic interpretation as “a coherent artistic project” can include creating a new text for a libretto, which is aligned to fundamentally important provisions of the director’s concept. It was true for G. Verdі’s “LaTraviata” theatrical performance implemented on the stage of the State Musical Theatre named after People’s Artist of the Republic V. Nemirovich-Danchenko (1934). Due to their provocative approach and radicalism of breaking with wellestablished traditions the ideas of the stage producers (directors, a conductor, an artist and a librettist) are in tune with the guidelines of the modern interpreters of opera classic. Consequently, that far away experience becomes relevant nowadays. Considering it, one can enable solve certain problems in condition when the new ideological principles and innovative art directions are spread. There is an urgent necessity to define the principles of coping with a libretto as an integral part of a holistic director’s vision on the example of “LaTraviata” staging implemented by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), who was one of the most prominent reformers of both drama and musical theatres in the XX century. So, the aim of this article is to analyze the libretto for the opera “La Traviata” by G. Verdi created by V. Inber using the research approaches of theater studies and literary theory and to define the principles of working with the verbal text as with the part of a holistic director’s conception implemented by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The results of the research. Taking into account the guiding directions of the Soviet ideology, the producers obviously over accentuate the social component of the conflict. As a result, “the scenic situation is exacerbated” and consequently “Violetta’s social characteristics” are adjusted; being originally a demimondaine, the main heroine turns into an opera singer, whose tragedy makes the class conflict obvious. The total redefining of the conflict, transferring the place of the action (Venice) and the time (the 1870s), and characters’ social tagging enables implementing another fundamentally important provision – an aesthetic one. The visual identity of the 1870s is strongly associated with the impressionists’ images, Venice is identified with a carnival and relevant artistic attributes (the third act of the play). Focusing on the certain “painting archetype of the epoch”, the set designer (P. Williams) created the suitably matched environment for scenic playing. The innovative approach provided by the director’s concept is implemented within the libretto text by means of updating the stage narrative itself. The author of the libretto, Vera Inber (1890–1972) does not emphasize the opera singer’s destiny, but pays attention to the main character’s relations with the bourgeois society. The latter observes the lifetime conflicts development of one of the artistic bohemia’s representatives with a great deal of interest, but without any compassion. That fact justifies using the new scene – the stage, which enables applying the principle “a theatre within a theatre” (also in the sphere of the artistic design). This approach is naturally combined with the use of the “heraldic construction” in V. Inber’s libretto. In the process of realizing the stage narrative, a separate plot situation is repeated in a small-scale version. The mindset to double and complicate the narrative is carried out in the libretto. Due to that fact, a new conflict (social in its origin and provided by the authors of the director’s vision) development is enabled. The relevant literary allusions in poetical text (although obviously shallow) are set to create a meaningful artistic prospect. In the turning points, the storylines development in V. Inber’s libretto coincides with F. М. Piave’s libretto drama collisions: happy lovers; their happiness, destroyed by Alfred’s father; having an argument and the heroine’s death. The key distinction of a new version is the refusal to use Violetta’s disease as the character’s feature and the plot component, which determines the tragic ending. That is why the fourth act becomes fundamentally different, unlike the original one. Being ignored by the bourgeois environment, Violetta secludes herself from the society and abandons her successful career. The singer informs her coactors (who appear on the stage later) about that fact in the letter. Implementing the principle “a theatre within a theatre” consistently, V. Inber treats the entire final set (especially the heroine’s death) as the last scene of the theatrical performance. Thus, the inevitability of the tragic resolution of the conflict between the artistic personality and the bourgeois society is proved. It facilitates realizing dramatically vital guidelines of a director’s general vision, which becomes determinant in the process of staging G. Verdі’s masterpiece. Conclusions. The practice of rewriting librettos in the first decades of XXI century acquires a new relevance. First, creating a new libretto resolves all the disagreements between a conception of the production team and the original verbal text nowadays. Mostly those contradictions emerge in the process of changing the locality, in which the action proceeds and the time of the plot. Secondly, one of the most burning problems of the ХХІ century musical theatre, concerning the performance language choice, is resolved. Performing an opera using the audience’s native language promotes full-fledged communication between the actors and the spectators. Thirdly, the necessity for rewriting librettos supposes involving the prominent masters of the word, especially poets. Thus the effective dialogue between different national cultures is put into practice and the active circulation of the previous centuries classic (including the opera one) in the socio-cultural sphere is insured.
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MÓRICZ, KLÁRA. "Decadent truncation: liberated Eros in Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great." Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 2 (2008): 181–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586709002468.
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AbstractRussian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié (1881/2–1966) dedicated his The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1948–1961), an opera based on Pushkin's story about the poet's African great-grandfather, to ‘Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history.’ Neoclassical in its subject matter, reliance on conventional musical forms, and adherence to tonality, Lourié's Blackamoor is nevertheless also an exemplary symbolist opera. This article explains three symbolist aspects of the work: the sources of its libretto (Lourié's librettist Irina Graham interspersed the libretto with symbolist texts), its multi-layered cultural associations, and Lourié's decision to liberate and embody the erotic drive of the main character Ibrahim by representing it as the figure of Eros. Eradicated during the years of Stalinist terror, the culture of Silver Age Russia thus continued to find a voice in the emigrant Lourié's last opera.
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Leneman, Helen. "Re-visioning a Biblical Story through Libretto and Music: Debora e Jaele by Ildebrando Pizzetti." Biblical Interpretation 15, no. 4-5 (2007): 428–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156851507x216490.
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AbstractBoth music and librettos are a form of midrash (creative re-telling), because they retell all or part of a story by creating a particular mood or feeling musically. The re-telling is in both the altered text and in the language of music. Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) wrote both the libretto and music of Debora e Jaele from 1917-1921. In this libretto, motivations are completely reversed. Characters perceived in the biblical account as "good" and "bad" seem to be switched. Our previous presumptions about the story and its characters are challenged: the belief that Sisera is evil and powerful, and has no positive qualities; that Deborah and Jael never met; and that Jael and Sisera had had no prior encounters. The libretto and the music succeed in depicting three-dimensional characters with conflicting motives and feelings. The addition of dimensions to the characters amplifies the moral ambiguities found in the original narrative. Sisera becomes a dominant and central character of this opera. Pizzetti is offering a counter-reading, in which the "villain" becomes a kind of hero and the listener can understand why Jael succumbs to his charms. A recurrent theme in this work is the testing of and by God. The viewpoints of Jael and Deborah depict what Pizzetti described as "human" justice (Jael) and "divine" justice (Deborah). An encounter with this opera will alter forever our reading of this biblical story.
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Ladič, Branko. "Karl Goldmark und seine letzten Opernwerke." Studia Musicologica 57, no. 3-4 (2016): 325–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/6.2016.57.3-4.3.
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Karl Goldmark (1830–1915) was undoubtedly one the most influential composers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and through his first opera – The Queen of Sheba – he was also very well-known abroad. This opera, with its very fashionable oriental subject, was first performed in Vienna in 1875 and was one of the greatest successes of the period. After Merlin (1886) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1896), a “song-opera” strongly influenced by the Biedermeier-period, Goldmark wrote three operas over the next ten years. A Prisoner of War (libretto E. Schlicht, premiered in 1899 in Vienna) was based on one episode of the Iliad. In this short opera the composer tried to express the change of Achilles’ soul, but he mostly failed due to a relatively weak and conventional libretto and vague musical style. In the following opera, Götz von Berlichingen (libretto A. M. Willner, premiered 1902) the libretto is also the weakest element of the work and the whole opera reminds one of Meyerbeer ’s operas. The composer found a renewed inspiration during the work on his last opera – The Winter’s Tale (libretto by Alfred Maria Willner after Shakespeare, premiered in 1907 in Vienna). This fairy tale opera is full of interesting musical moments and elements written in Goldmark’s late style and is still attractive for the opera-going public.
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Garavaglia, Andrea, and Katherine Kamal. "AMAZONS FROM MADRID TO VIENNA, BY WAY OF ITALY: THE CIRCULATION OF A SPANISH TEXT AND THE DEFINITION OF AN IMAGINARY." Early Music History 31 (2012): 189–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261127912000046.
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The fascinating phenomenon of the migration of theatrical subjects between literary genres, languages and countries is enriched through a new example discussed in this article. A handwritten libretto compiled in Rome for the court of Vienna, La simpatia nell'odio, overo Le amazoni amanti by Giovanni Pietro Monesio (1664), was discovered to be a faithful translation of the Spanish play Las Amazonas by Antonio de Solís (1657), hitherto known as the basis of a much later libretto, Caduta del regno delle Amazzoni, by Domenico De Totis (1690), set by Bernardo Pasquini. Monesio's libretto not only allows us to reconstruct the manner and time of the European circulation of a Spanish subject (from Madrid to Rome, to Vienna and Naples), but also to shed light on wider cultural aspects. First of all, it increases the number of librettos closely based on Spanish plays, of which so far only a few examples by Giulio Rospigliosi were known. Secondly, it provides further proof of the hypotheticised Spanish influence on the fortune of the Amazons in Italian opera and confirmation that its first appearance was beyond the Alps rather than in Italy. Finally, in the context of the the Habsburg Viennese court, the success of the Amazons seems to be linked to the political need to create a strong symbolic association between the ‘discourse’ on the virago and the legitimation of female power.
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Carter, Tim. "Monteverdi, Early Opera and a Question of Genre: The Case of Andromeda (1620)." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 137, no. 1 (2012): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2012.669927.
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ABSTRACTIn 1985, Albi Rosenthal reported his discovery of a printed libretto for the opera Andromeda, composed by Monteverdi for performance in Mantua in Carnival 1620. This libretto deserves a new examination for its dramatic content, its likely musical setting (now lost) and some fundamental questions of genre. Its patron, Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, used the librettist Hercole Marliani to broker his self-fashioning by imitating both Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), supported by Vincenzo's elder brother, and Arianna (1608), which in effect belonged to the prince's parents. Monteverdi was typically slow to produce the score. The customary explanation is his disenchantment with Mantua and his new duties at St Mark's, Venice. However, we now see that both the Gonzagas and Monteverdi used Andromeda, like others of his Mantuan-commissioned works, as a bargaining chip in a complex exchange of obligations and favours typical of the courtly world to which the composer still belonged.
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RICE, JOHN. "The Roman intermezzo and Sacchini's La contadina in corte." Cambridge Opera Journal 12, no. 2 (2000): 91–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700000914.
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The origins of the Roman intermezzo, an important and influential sub-genre of Italian comic opera, can be traced back to the 1730s, when the composer and librettist Benedetto Micheli wrote several two-part intermezzi for the Teatro Valle and other theaters in Rome for performance during the intermissions of spoken plays. The Valle cultivated the intermezzo with particular consistency during the next six decades, presenting works by many distinguished composers, including Sacchini, Paisiello, and Cimarosa. Sacchini's La contadina in corte, on a libretto derived from Giacomo Rust's three-act comic opera of the same title, may serve as a good example of the Roman intermezzo.
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Pavan, Luca. "Italian Opera Librettos with Similar Plot: Plagiarism or Established Practice?" International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics 6, no. 2 (2020): 76–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.18178/ijlll.2020.6.2.254.
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Joncus, B. "Opera librettos and British politics." Early Music 42, no. 2 (2014): 297–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/em/cau034.
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GILLIAM, BRYAN. "Ariadne, Daphne and the problem of Verwandlung." Cambridge Opera Journal 15, no. 1 (2003): 67–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586703000673.
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The theme of transformation (Verwandlung) plays a significant role in the work of Richard Strauss, from his Tod und Verklärung (1889) to his Metamorphosen (1945). This article examines two Strauss operas where transformation is a central aspect of the libretto: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/16), libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Daphne (1937), libretto by Joseph Gregor. Though each opera focuses on transformation, this concept is interpreted and realized in entirely different ways. For Hofmannsthal, Verwandlung is a journey outward to a new level of existence, attaining a new sense of humanity. For Gregor, transformation is an inward movement, joining nature, and becoming divine in the German-Romantic sense of the term.
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LÜTTEKEN, LAURENZ. "NEGATING OPERA THROUGH OPERA: COSÌ FAN TUTTE AND THE REVERSE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT." Eighteenth Century Music 6, no. 2 (2009): 229–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570609990017.
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ABSTRACTAmong the operas on which Mozart and Da Ponte collaborated, Così fan tutte is a special case. In some ways, the libretto is more conventional than those provided for Le nozze di Figaro or Don Giovanni, and Mozart was not the first composer asked to set it. To understand the work best, it is necessary to read the text closely. This article concentrates on a few, highly significant characteristics – in particular, the locations in which the opera takes place. Such details provide the foundations for surprising insights into the opera. First, the libretto deals with central issues in eighteenth-century aesthetics, but the mechanist philosophy that informs the plot (reminiscent of that theorized by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L'Homme machine) defuses these issues over the course of the action. Secondly, the music that turns the libretto into an opera resonates with specialist issues of eighteenth-century music aesthetics, often to turn them, once again, on their heads. In the last analysis, Così fan tutte is an opera in which both text and music question truth and reliability, and the consequences are serious for the opera, for music and for the very Enlightenment itself.
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Giger, Andreas. "Behind the Police Chief's Closed Doors: The Unofficial Censors of Verdi in Rome." Nineteenth-Century Music Review 7, no. 2 (2010): 63–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s147940980000361x.
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A certain Filippo Nardoni, upon completing his review of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi'sDon Alvaro(the Roman version ofLa forza del destino), wrote to the director of the police: ‘I have marked in pencil the proposed corrections, which I have thought advisable for the wretched subject of the opera. If you don't like them, they can be easily erased with sandarac’. It seems strange that an ostensible censor would correct a libretto and then not mind seeing his corrections erased; censors were, after all, gatekeepers of morality and political propriety, and no libretto was supposed to be permitted without their approval. As it turns out, Nardoni was not an official Roman censor, and yet, he and other prominent personalities were more important in censoring Verdi's operas than their official colleagues. They were not only more rigorous when it came to identifying potentially dangerous passages but also worked as a team, passing the libretto around among themselves until an acceptable alternative was found.
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Abrahams, Marc. "Libretto: The Jargon Opera." Annals of Improbable Research 9, no. 1 (2003): 14–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.3142/107951403782226445.
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McClymonds, Marita P., and Gianfranco Folena. "Opera & Libretto II." Notes 52, no. 1 (1995): 94. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/898811.
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Marković, Tatjana. "Ottoman legacy and Oriental Self in Serbian opera." Studia Musicologica 57, no. 3-4 (2016): 391–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/6.2016.57.3-4.7.
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Serbia was an Ottoman province for almost four centuries; after some rebellions, the First and Second Uprising, she received the status of autonomous principality in 1830, and became independent in 1878. Due to the historical and cultural circumstances, the first stage music form was komad s pevanjem (theater play with music numbers), following with the first operas only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contrary to the usual practice to depict “golden age” of medieval national past, like in many other traditions of national opera, the earliest Serbian operas were dedicated to the recent past and coexistence with Ottomans. Thus the operas Na uranku (At dawn, 1904) by Stanislav Binički (1872–1942), Knez Ivo od Semberije (Prince Ivo of Semberia, 1911) by Isidor Bajić (1878–1915), both based on the libretti by the leading Serbian playwright Branislav Nušić, and also Zulumćar (The Hooligan, librettists: Svetozar Ćorović and Aleksa Šantić, 1927) by Petar Krstić (1877–1957), presented Serbia from the first decades of the nineteenth century. Later Serbian operas, among which is the most significant Koštana (1931, revised in 1940 and 1948) by Petar Konjović (1883–1970), composed after the theatre play under the same name by the author Borisav Stanković, shifts the focus of exoticism, presenting a life of a south-Serbian town in 1880. Local milieu of Vranje is depicted through tragic destiny of an enchanting beauty, a Roma singer Koštana, whose exoticism is coming from her belonging to the undesirable minority. These operas show how the national identity was constructed – by libretto, music and iconography – through Oriental Self. The language (marked by numerous Turkish loan words), musical (self)presentation and visual image of the main characters of the operas are identity signifiers, which show continuity as well as perception of the Ottoman cultural imperial legacy.
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Espíndola Mata, Laura Elizabeth. "Motezuma, la ópera mexica de Antonio Vivaldi y Girolamo Giusti." Investigación Teatral. Revista de artes escénicas y performatividad 11, no. 18 (2020): 121–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.25009/it.v11i18.2653.
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El ensayo propone un acercamiento a los aspectos escénicos involucrados en la única representación de la ópera Motezuma, con música de Antonio Vivaldi, la cual fue estrenada en el teatro Sant’Angelo de Venecia en 1733. Basándose en archivos históricos inéditos, la autora establece a Girolamo Giusti como el autor del libreto Motezuma, exponiendo además los motivos y las fuentes documentales que pudieron impulsar la creación de la ópera de tema “indio-americano”. Motezuma, a Mexica opera by Antonio Vivaldi and Girolamo GiustiAbstractThis article discusses the theatrical aspects involved in the only performance of the opera Motezuma by the composer Antonio Vivaldi, which premiered at the Sant’Angelo theater in Venice in 1733. The author uses unpublished historical archives to establish Girolamo Giusti as the true playwright of the libretto Motezuma, addressing the motives and sources that could have lead to the creation of this opera with an Indigenous-American theme. Recibido: 10 de marzo de 2020Aceptado: 28 de septiembre de 2020
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Poliakov, Ilia Aruslanovich. "Some peculiarities of opera libretto as a potential literary genre." Филология: научные исследования, no. 2 (February 2020): 37–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2454-0749.2020.2.29396.
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This article analyzes the changes pertaining to such level of literary works as a system of characters, category of space and time, phonetic system and composition; as well as changes in epic and dramatic oeuvres in the process of transformation of the text of literary work into an opera libretto. Analysis is conducted on peculiarities of the aforementioned levels of literary text and libretto. As an example of epic work, the author selected the A. S. Pushkin&rsquo;s verse novel &ldquo;Eugene Onegin&rdquo; and the eponymous opera composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky; as an example of dramatic work, the author picked the two poetic dramas from Pushkin&rsquo;s cycle &ldquo;The Stone Guest&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Miserly Knight&rdquo; and the eponymous operas by A. Dargomyzhsky and S. V. Rachmaninoff respectively. The following methods were applied in the course of this study: comparative based on juxtaposition of musical-scenic interpretation and precedent literary text; typological for determination of patterns, classification and generalization of the results. The author comes to the conclusion that the transformation of epic and dramatic literary texts into the opera libretto has similarities and differences on all levels of the text. The possible reasons of such phenomenon are discussed. The author answers a question whether or not libretto can be attributed to as a genre of fiction writing.
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LONGOBARDI, RUTH SARA. "Reading between the Lines: An Approach to the Musical and Sexual Ambiguities of Death in Venice." Journal of Musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 327–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2005.22.3.327.
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ABSTRACT Framing opera as a collaborative genre compels an examination of differences. In particular, opera's media may be understood as simultaneous but not necessarily as cooperative or neutral. This conception of opera raises issues of power dynamics and the politics of voice, both within the work and among its artists. In Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, musico-dramatic dissonances center on the protagonist's homoerotic obsession with a young boy. His momentous ““I love you”” at the end of the act 1 finale is accompanied by a musical gesture that does not affirm but rather resists this coming-out event. The gesture's subsequent transformations in other passages that contain no text, and two years later in Britten's Third String Quartet, reinforce the sense of musical opposition to the libretto's homosexual trajectory——a trajectory that results in the protagonist's shame and untimely death. If musical detachment from the libretto suggests subtext, then it also points to alternative voices. Britten's homosexuality, and the pressures that accumulated around sexual identity in postwar England, argue for connections between musical distance and closeted discourse. Analysis must acknowledge the role of the composer's experiences in the varying characterizations of the protagonist but must also cope with the limits to this type of investigation: The attempt to draw definitive connections between music and sexuality limits the suppleness of our critical apparatus. Conceiving of opera as collaboration prompts a reevaluation of the work as potentially contradictory and fragmented but also advocates against the resolution of such contradictions into coherent authorial statements. Collaboration dislodges autonomy and unity and in their place recommends polyphonies——of authors and voices, among media but also within them.
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Manuwald, Gesine. "Nero and Octavia in Baroque Opera: Their Fate in Monteverdi's Poppea and Keiser's Octavia." Ramus 34, no. 2 (2005): 152–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00000990.
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The imperial history playOctavia, transmitted among the corpus of Senecan drama, has suffered from uncertainty about its date, author, literary genre and intended audience as regards its appreciation in modern criticism. Although the majority of scholars will agree nowadays that the play was not written by Seneca himself, there is still a certain degree of disagreement about its literary genre and date. Anyway, such scholarly quibbles seem not to have affected poets and composers in the early modern era: they recognised the high dramatic potential of the story of Nero and his love relationships in 62 CE along with the involvement of the historical character and writer Seneca.Indeed, this phase in imperial history was apparently quite popular in Italian and German opera of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest of a number of operatic treatments of the emperor Nero (also the first opera presenting a historical topic) and arguably the best known today is an Italian version:L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea)to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello (1598-1659) and music attributed to Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), first produced in Giovanni Grimani's ‘Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo’ in Venice during the carnival season of 1643. Among the latest operas on this subject is a German version, which is hardly known and rarely performed today:Die Römische Unruhe. Oder: Die Edelmütige Octavia. Musicalisches Schau-Spiel (The Roman Unrest. Or: The Magnanimous Octavia. Musical Play)by the librettist Barthold Feind (1678-1721) and the composer Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739), first performed in the ‘Oper am Gänsemarkt’ in Hamburg on 5 August 1705. In this period German opera was generally influenced by Italian opera, but at the same time there were attempts, particularly in Hamburg, to establish a typically German opera.
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Kater, Don, and Marc Abrahams. "Libretto: The Brain Food Opera." Annals of Improbable Research 7, no. 1 (2001): 19–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3142/107951401782610693.
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Mabrey, Ed. "The Libretto of the Opera." Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 7, no. 4 (2018): 176–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2018.7.4.176.
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By following a young Black male through a day in his life, we see, through his eyes, the world he has been brought into. Using the framework of a libretto allows those who might otherwise not connect to the situation a vehicle with which to do so.
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BEARD, DAVID. "The Shadow of Opera: Dramatic Narrative and Musical Discourse in Gawain." Twentieth-Century Music 2, no. 2 (2005): 159–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572206000259.
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The opera Gawain (1991; revised 1994 and 1999) brought together Harrison Birtwistle and the poet David Harsent in a reworking of the late fourteenth-century narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That Birtwistle asked Harsent to make a large number of alterations to his original libretto has already been documented. The present article, which draws on the sketching processes of both librettist and composer, reveals the nature and the ramifications of those changes. The discussion is particularly concerned with the contradictions and multiple narrative layers that resulted from the Harsent–Birtwistle collaboration, and with the composer’s suggestion that there is both a secret drama in the orchestra, and instruments that function like unheard voices. A consideration of Birtwistle’s sketches also reveals a preoccupation with line, in particular with finding different ways of shadowing vocal and instrumental parts, and ambiguously shrouding originary lines in layers of varied reflection. These musical devices represent Birtwistle’s response to Harsent’s interest in divided subjectivity, and to the idea that Gawain should develop a sense of his own identity.
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Lewenhaupt, Inga. "A Dream Play on the Opera Stage." Theatre Research International 18, S1 (1993): 42–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030788330002109x.
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On 15 September 1992 one of the most important new operas written in Scandinavia had its opening night at The Royal Opera House, Stockholm. The opera, based on Strindberg's A Dream Play, libretto and music by Ingvar Lidholm, was long awaited and surpassed the highest expectations. The score has a prelude and two acts, (duration two hours and twenty minutes, pause excluded) and requires a large orchestra, an extended percussion section, mixed chorus, children's chorus and fifteen roles.
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Scalera, Alessia Maria. "E’ lecito ai poeti alterar le favole: The story of Dido according to Giovan Battista Busenello." Anuari de Filologia. Antiqua et Mediaeualia 2, no. 11 (2021): 103–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1344/afam202121136400.
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The aim of this paper is to analyze the rewriting of Dido’s myth by Giovan Battista Busenello, the librettist of the first opera named after the queen of Carthage. The imposing regality of Dido and the highly dramatic tension of the Aeneid are absent in Busenello’s libretto. Interestingly, if in the fourth book of the Virgilian poem Dido kills herself with Aeneas’ sword, in the final act of the opera she marries Iarbas, king of Gaetulians. Poignantly, in her only aria Dido sings her rejection of Iarbas’ advances, instead of her death wish or her sorrow for Aeneas’ departure.
 The tragic éthos we expect of Dido surfaces in two other characters in the opera, Hecuba and Cassandra, specifically through their laments. The basso lines of their laments call to mind the formal archetype at the heart of the famous Dido’s lament, Dido’s aria in Dido and Eneas, composed by Henry Purcell forty-eight years after the Didone. In that way, Hecuba and Cassandra constitute the actual tragic characters in the Didone, while, conversely, Dido is granted a happy ending, a deviation from the source just as peculiar as its author.
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Shchetynsky, O. S. "Musical iconography of Annunciation: personal experience." Aspects of Historical Musicology 17, no. 17 (2019): 74–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-17.05.
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Background. The objective of the article is to analyze the interaction, for sake of artistic unity of a work, of the musical, textural and theatrical structures and solutions in the contemporary opera as in a synthetic genre. The author uses his chamber opera “Annunciation” as an example of these processes and shows the ways certain dramatic and theatrical ideas determine musical solutions. Although since the middle of the 19th century composers sometimes wrote an opera text themselves, the common case was still a collaboration of two (sometimes more) creators: a composer and a librettist, each of them being an expert in their own particular field. Their collaboration and mutual flexibility are of great importance, especially at the initial phase of creation, when a composer makes a decision concerning fundamental features and structures of a future work. Since an opera libretto often consists of the fragments borrowed from previously created texts, a composer should comprehend the libretto in its new integrity. Understanding dramatic intentions of a librettist is extremely important, too. On the other hand, a good libretto should contain some elements of incompleteness (let’s call it “dramatic gaping”) to ensure the composer’s freedom in building musical forms and to encourage him / her to elaborate self-own personal solutions both in musical and dramatic (theatrical) fields. The results of the research. The text of Alexander Shchetynsky’s chamber opera, “Annunciation”, is inspired by the dialogue described in Chapter 1 of St. Luke’s Gospel between the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel, who announced about future birth of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Gradual transformation of Mary who prepares to become the mother of God forms the action. Since both characters are positive and no conflict is developed between them, dramatic tension appears basing on the contrast between Mary’s happiness, when she hears the message, and the presentiment of her own and her Son’s future tragedy. Instrumental scoring (piano, celesta and metal percussion) is in no way the klavier variant, but the only possible version for performance of this opera. Percussion instruments, played by the pianist and partly by the singer, symbolize the Heaven. The pianist plays the grand piano, which stays at the stage. He is not a common accompanist but the second character (the Angel Gabriel) taking a direct part in the stage action, so the sounds of the piano is Angel’s secret speech. The idea to shape two characters with totally different means was suggested by the librettist Alexey Parin. His concept of putting the speech of the Angel not into a human voice but into the wordless “voice” of an instrument looked extremely promising and innovative. This “secret utterance” of the Angel, then, became the starting point of the opera and the source of its genre definition: the stage dialogues without accompaniment. The structure of the work is as follows (all the episodes go one after another without a break). Episode 1. “Presentiment” (aria). Mary is occupied with the spinning wheel. The Angel has not yet come, only the tinkling of percussion instruments hints at grace descending upon Mary. Episode 2. “Whiff “(recitative). The Angel is entering. The mood is strange, unreal, as if in a dream, when the common logic of action is broken. Episode 3. “Good Word” (scene). The first dramatic climax. The piano part is resembling a choir singing, which Mary is understanding and answering to it. The general mood of the music is tragic: it is the presentiment of a terrible ordeal and human grief awaiting Mary. Episode 4. “Ecstasy” (aria). The Immaculate Conception. The climax is of lofty, lyrical substance. There is free soaring of the voice and feeling of the miracle and happiness. Episode 5. “Fear” (scene). The second dramatic climax: Mary has been realizing her future. The vocal style is unstable; recitation and Sprechgesang follow cantabile closely. Episode 6. “Farewell” (aria). Happiness mixed with bitter presentiments. At the very end the music resembles a lullaby. The musical language of the opera does not contain any elements of traditional Church music. This is spiritual music intended for the theatre or concert performance, without any allusion to Divine Service. In style the work tends toward musical modernism and 20th century avantgarde, with their attributes of atonality and modality, rhythmical complication, emancipation of timbre component and dissonances. The latter were used both in atonal and modal context. Both horizontal and vertical elements of the texture have their common roots in several micro-thematic interval structures, exactly, in the combinations of a triton and minor second (including octave transpositions, the major seventh and minor ninth). These structures form the common basement of all musical components and lead to thematic unity of the opera. Despite the modernistic orientation, cantabile style prevails in the soprano part, making use of various types of singing such as recitation, arioso, parlando, Sprechgesang, whisper, and others. Conclusion. The musical solutions in “Annunciation” appear as a consequence and elaboration of the dramatic concept of libretto. Analysis of its peculiarities led to forming their musical equivalents, which helped to achieve the integrity of all the main components of the work.
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Zgliniecka-Hojda, Paulina. "ahat ilī – siostra bogów Olgi Tokarczuk i Aleksandra Nowaka. Od powieści do operowego libretta." Kwartalnik Młodych Muzykologów UJ, no. 47 (4) (2020): 157–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/23537094kmmuj.20.021.13207.
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ahat ilī – Sister of Gods by Olga Tokarczuk and Aleksander Nowak: From the Novel to the Opera Libretto In 2018, the third opera composition by Aleksander Nowak (*1979), ahat ilī – Sister of Gods had its premiere., The libretto was created by Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, on the basis of her own novel. This kind of combination of literature and opera, reinforced by the unique situation in which the author of the text-inspiration and the libretto is the same person, suggests that the work should be defined as a literary opera. The aim of the article is to present the composition in terms of its genres as well as to show the unique path of its content from literary work to operatic, together with the analysis of the libretto from the librettological perspective.
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Kanev, A. I. "HANDEL's OPERAS: LITERARY SOURCES, STRUCTURE, LIBRETTO LANGUAGE." Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series History and Philology 29, no. 3 (2019): 517–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2412-9534-2019-29-3-517-523.
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This article studies thirteen Italian libretti of music dramas that were staged with Handel's music in the first half of the XVIII century. The libretti texts were written by a range of authors such as N. F. Haym, A. Salvi, P. Rolli, A. Zeno, V. Grimani, A. Hill, G. Rossi, N. Minato, A. Piovene. The majority of stories are based on famous Italian and French literary pieces. The article looks at literary and linguistic aspects of libretti. The literary components are the problem of primary sources, plot features and their transformations, drama structure and texts form. The linguistic components are rare verb forms, syntactical and lexical features of libretti. Attention is paid to the sound organisation of the texts - euphonia. Examples are drawn of the usage of alliteration and assonance.
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Macdonald, Hugh. "The prose libretto." Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 155–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700002949.
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Before returning to Paris in 1874 after his eventful four-year stay in England, Gounod embarked on a comic opera based on Molière's George Dandin. Recuperating in St Leonard's-on-Sea from a ‘cerebral attack’ he wrote a lengthy Preface, dated 10–11 April 1874, from which the following is drawn:The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions which will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based […]