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Verdi: A Symposium

David Manning

in Vaughan Williams on Music

Giuseppe Verdi wrote operas. He did not add music to plays full of superficial philosophy or bogus psychology. Verdi carried on his drama by means of lyric song. His orchestra, it is true, has a ... More

Giuseppe Verdi wrote operas. He did not add music to plays full of superficial philosophy or bogus psychology. Verdi carried on his drama by means of lyric song. His orchestra, it is true, has a wonderful sonority, but it is the voice on which he counts to elucidate the situation. Verdi realised that song can carry on a plot in a way which words alone can never do. A good example of this comes from the last Act of the Verdi opera, Rigoletto. This chapter also discusses Verdi's Requiem, which is a heap of contradictions. It gives the strongest proofs that there are no canons of art. Any right-minded musician who only knew the Requiem from description would certainly condemn it. Verdi frankly makes frequent use of such well-worn aids to excitement as the diminished seventh and the chromatic scale.Less

Bass Clarinet, Contra Bass, and Contra Alto Music

Albert R. Rice

in From the Clarinet D'Amour to the Contra Bass: A History of the Large Size Clarinets, 1740-1860

Chapter five is dedicated to bass clarinet music grouped in the categories: early reported works; notation practice; a chronological description of works from 1834 to 1860 listed by composer; band ... More

Chapter five is dedicated to bass clarinet music grouped in the categories: early reported works; notation practice; a chronological description of works from 1834 to 1860 listed by composer; band music; and music written for the contra bass and contra alto clarinets.Less

Julian Medford Budden 1924–2007

Pierluigi Petrobelli and Roger Parker

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 153 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VII

Julian Medford Budden (1924–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the finest scholar of nineteenth-century Italian opera of his generation. He will be remembered for his achievements as a ... More

Julian Medford Budden (1924–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the finest scholar of nineteenth-century Italian opera of his generation. He will be remembered for his achievements as a producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for his broadcasts and reviews, and above all for his books on Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Indeed, his passing leaves a huge gap in the field of opera studies. Budden was born in Hoylake, near Liverpool, on April 9, 1924, the only child of Lionel Budden and Maud Budden. In 1951 he started at the BBC, where he remained for his entire working life. Budden's first post was as a clerk and script editor; he then rose through the ranks to become a producer, Chief Producer of Opera, and finally External Services Music Organizer. Two aspects of Budden's background were likely to have been fundamental to his scholarly achievement: his exposure to Classics at Oxford University and his career in BBC Radio.Less

Epilogue

Ellen Rosand

in Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

This chapter places Monteverdi, the dramatist, within the context of the history of opera, as initiator of and participant in the grand tradition that links him with such figures as Handel and ... More

This chapter places Monteverdi, the dramatist, within the context of the history of opera, as initiator of and participant in the grand tradition that links him with such figures as Handel and Mozart, and especially his co-nazionale—and near namesake—at the other end of that tradition, Giuseppe Verdi. Although the modern Monteverdi revival came long after his death, Verdi, by the example of his last operas, may have prepared the way for that new appreciation, reaffirming the dramatic power of music which his Venetian predecessor had first demonstrated over three centuries earlier.Less

A Tonal GIS

Steven Rings

in Tonality and Transformation

Chapter 2 introduces a Generalized Interval System (or GIS) that models intervals among heard scale degrees. A heard scale-degree is formalized as an ordered pair (sd, pc), in which sd is a sensation ... More

Chapter 2 introduces a Generalized Interval System (or GIS) that models intervals among heard scale degrees. A heard scale-degree is formalized as an ordered pair (sd, pc), in which sd is a sensation of scale-degree quality and pc is a pitch class. Relevant ideas from music cognition concerning tonal qualities (or qualia) are surveyed. The various sections of the chapter explore the formal and interpretive resources of the sd/pc GIS, including: familiar and exotic intervals among heard scale degrees; sd/pc sets and set-classes; keys; accidentals; and various species of transposition and inversion. The utility of these theoretical constructs is demonstrated in analytical vignettes on music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler.Less

Aroldo

Abramo Basevi

in The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi

This chapter analyzes Verdi's Aroldo, first performed in August 1857 at Rimini. The opera is nothing more than a reshuffled Stiffelio. Verdi made changes in the plot and the music due to the ... More

This chapter analyzes Verdi's Aroldo, first performed in August 1857 at Rimini. The opera is nothing more than a reshuffled Stiffelio. Verdi made changes in the plot and the music due to the difficulties created by censorship and by the bad public reception of Stiffelio. The main alteration in the plot was that the priest Stiffelio became the warrior Aroldo. With regard to the music, some things from Stiffelio were preserved in Aroldo and others were changed or added.Less

Catholic Themes in Art and Music

Charles Scribner III

in Teaching the Tradition: Catholic Themes in Academic Disciplines

God made things perfectly, and Michelangelo presented them in idealized form in his sculpture and painting. The anguish Michelangelo suffered to create beautiful things spurred him on to create an ... More

God made things perfectly, and Michelangelo presented them in idealized form in his sculpture and painting. The anguish Michelangelo suffered to create beautiful things spurred him on to create an enormous number of beautiful shapes. His paintings of creation are mirrored in music in Haydn's grand oratorio The Creation, the writing of which was a deeply religious experience for Haydn. The early Church gradually chose “lovely” art and music as preferred ways to portray Christian belief. Church architecture found new ways to proclaim Christ as King and illustrate both his life and life with him in heaven. Caravaggio launched the age of the Baroque in Rome with his bold and brutal naturalism, portraying figures the way he saw them. In his paintings he provided wonderful, novel psychological interpretations of biblical accounts. Rubens also showed exquisite sensitivity to biblical accounts of the birth, passion, and resurrection of Christ. Bernini combined art, architecture, and sculpture in many of his works to create a beautiful whole, and he was always careful to credit God for his inspirations. His Ecstasy of St. Teresa is a beautiful interpretation in marble of a sublime experience. Mozart and Verdi were great composers of religious music.Less

Mosè in Egitto (1818–1819) and Moïse et Pharaon (1827)

Richard Osborne

in Rossini: His Life and Works

In its original form, Mosè in Egitto is an Azione Tragico-Sacra, a biblical drama suitable for staging during Lent. As was the custom, Gioachino Rossini and his librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, made ... More

In its original form, Mosè in Egitto is an Azione Tragico-Sacra, a biblical drama suitable for staging during Lent. As was the custom, Gioachino Rossini and his librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, made the restriction palatable by grafting a secular narrative onto a sacred one. In this instance the story of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt is joined with Francesco Ringhieri’s 1760 romance L’Osiride. Thus a young Jewish girl, Elcia, falls in love with the Pharaoh’s son, Osiride. Like Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, it is a tale of the tension between love and duty, of disputed homelands, and of the counterpointing of the bonds of family and the bonds of country. For much of its length Mosè in Egitto has a guileless beauty about it, appropriate to the theme of young love and young nationhood, qualities which are not so much sacrificed as choked and smothered in the grandiose revision Rossini prepared for the Paris Opera in 1827.Less

An Answer to Two Opera Quotations

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter highlights Alexander Kluge's engagement with opera. In this essay, Kluge addresses two quotations from opera. The first is from Guiseppe Verdi's Aida (1871): “Do you see? The angel of ... More

This chapter highlights Alexander Kluge's engagement with opera. In this essay, Kluge addresses two quotations from opera. The first is from Guiseppe Verdi's Aida (1871): “Do you see? The angel of death…” This line is spoken by the main character Aida. Kluge investigates the concept of the angel of death. He then explains that the mission of the twentieth century is to tell counter-stories to the collected stories of the nineteenth century. The second quote is from Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman (1843): “Here I am, true to you till death!” This line is spoken by the character Senta. Feelings take time to develop. It therefore seems unlikely that love at first sight is mutual. Thus, the suddenness of the Dutchman's and Senta's fatal and mutual falling in love has something of an act of force. One could call it a putsch in the domain of emotion. Kluge then discusses the unfulfilled program of the bourgeois tragic drama.Less

Shakespeare and Opera

Adrian Streete

in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts

This chapter reports that both Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi were dominant presences in the European obsession with opera in the nineteenth century. An analysis of some complex confluences of ... More

This chapter reports that both Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi were dominant presences in the European obsession with opera in the nineteenth century. An analysis of some complex confluences of Shakespearean history, politics and performance is presented. The chapter then explores in detail the genesis and first performances of Otello. Some of the major recorded interpretations of the role of Otello during the twentieth century are reviewed. It also shows that the performance history of Otello is as contested and complex as the original play upon which Verdi and his team of collaborators drew. Today, the world's opera houses offer only one of many outlets for operatic performances. There are any number of iconic singers whose interpretations of the canonical Shakespearean operas either on recordings or on film deserve wider exposure and further examination beyond the remit of classical music and opera scholars.Less

The Threepenny Opera (1950–1954) and Other Adaptations

Howard Pollack

in Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World

This chapter discusses Blitzstein’s work as director, translator, and adapter from 1950 to the end of his life. This includes his supervision of a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan for which ... More

This chapter discusses Blitzstein’s work as director, translator, and adapter from 1950 to the end of his life. This includes his supervision of a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan for which Leonard Bernstein had written the music; his adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera for American audiences; his adaptations of Verdi’s La Traviata, Offenbach’s L’îsle de Tulipatan, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and Brecht’s Mother Courage, among other works. The adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, which starred Lotte Lenya and Scott Merrill, enjoyed special success; by the time of its close in 1961, it had broken the record for New York’s longest-running musical, while one of its songs, “Mack the Knife,” proved one of the great hits of the time, with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald.Less

In Praise of Overstatement

Mary Ann Smart

in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

When Friedrich Nietzsche turned against Richard Wagner, one of his complaints was that Wagner was an incorrigible “man of the theater,” “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” who ever existed. With this, ... More

When Friedrich Nietzsche turned against Richard Wagner, one of his complaints was that Wagner was an incorrigible “man of the theater,” “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” who ever existed. With this, Nietzsche was pointing (among other things) to Wagner's continuing attachment to an earlier model of gesture and stage movement, to the composer's affection for extended pantomime scenes and to his frequent reliance on small-scale coordination between music and gesture, both of which betray a hidden debt to the aesthetics of melodrama. One surprising result of retracing nineteenth-century operatic history in relation to gesture and gestural music is to unsettle the traditional opposition between Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, and to highlight the debt to French drama and to grand opera shared by these supposed antipodes of nineteenth-century operatic style. The bodies animated and transformed by the kinds of musical effects discussed here do not only belong to women; “mimomania” can confer authority equally on male and female characters. The appeal of this inquiry into opera's bodies is tightly entwined with the representation of gender.Less

Uneasy Bodies: Verdi and Sublimation

Mary Ann Smart

in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

This chapter begins with Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) because a single aria from that opera exerted a powerful magnetism for Giuseppe Verdi. It looks at the conjunction between melodic ... More

This chapter begins with Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) because a single aria from that opera exerted a powerful magnetism for Giuseppe Verdi. It looks at the conjunction between melodic climax and kneeling gesture in Verdi's career. One context for Verdi's kneeling scenes can be found in Enrico delle Sedie's 1885 treatise on operatic acting, the Estetica del canto e dell'arte melodrammatica. Given the kneeling gesture's roots in the lexicon of mélodrame, it is hardly surprising that a very similar pose appears in Verdi's own grand opera—although the scene for a kneeling soprano in Don Carlos (1867) is far less static and less semiotically transparent than the stock situations of mélodrame. Verdi's near-erasure of pulse and emphasis on consummation in the afterlife in both the Don Carlos and Aida (1871) duets leave behind early nineteenth-century aesthetics of sensibility, to move both toward a more “transcendent” musical style and toward a dramatic mode in which the body (and especially the female body) is more symbolic than concrete.Less

Of Andalusian Maidens and Recognition Scenes: Crossed Wires in Il trovatore and La traviata

Roger Parker

in Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio

This chapter focuses on Giuseppe Verdi's operas Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. These works are among the earliest operas by any composer to have retained a place in the repertory since the ... More

This chapter focuses on Giuseppe Verdi's operas Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. These works are among the earliest operas by any composer to have retained a place in the repertory since the moment of their arrival. It questions the tendency to group the three works together and highlights the similarities and differences among them.Less

In Search of Verdi

Roger Parker

in Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio

This chapter examines Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff. It suggests that one of the notable aspects of Verdi's late compositional practice is that there emerged important discontinuities, both with ... More

This chapter examines Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff. It suggests that one of the notable aspects of Verdi's late compositional practice is that there emerged important discontinuities, both with his previous methods and, arguably, within the works themselves. It evaluates Verdi's work in relation to Theodor W. Adorno's discussion and criticism on Richard Wagner's works. It also discusses the moral lessons in the different chapters of Falstaff.Less

Taking Possession of Egypt for the Cause of Science

Jason Thompson

in Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology: 1: From Antiquity to 1881

Auguste Mariette went to Egypt to collect Coptic manuscripts for the Bibliothèque Nationale. He failed in that mission but made one of the most sensational Egyptological discoveries of the century, ... More

Auguste Mariette went to Egypt to collect Coptic manuscripts for the Bibliothèque Nationale. He failed in that mission but made one of the most sensational Egyptological discoveries of the century, the Serapeum at Saqqara. In 1858 he established Egypt's Antiquities Service and became its first director, a post that gave him an extraordinary level of authority over all antiquities in Egypt. Mariette's priorities were to protect Egypt's monuments, which he had seen damaged and lost at an alarming rate, and to clear the monuments from the accumulations of the ages. He established the Bulaq Museum, the precursor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In his energetic efforts Mariette was assisted by several able individuals at the Antiquities Service and by his talented friend, the great German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch who benefitted in turn by the access that Mariette provided to the monuments. Mariette wrote the scenario and designed the costumes and backdrops for Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, which premiered in Cairo in 1871.Less