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Next Day Opera Tickets Reliably.The History of Opera
Italy has played a major role in the development of Western music. Scholars can only speculate about what the music of Roman antiquity sounded like; no notated music from Roman times has been preserved. The earliest known Italian music is bound up with the history of the Catholic church. The two great centers of liturgical and musical reform in Italy in the first millennium were Milan and Rome. Saint Ambrose (c.333-97), bishop of Milan, imported several musical practices from Syria, including the custom of antiphonal singing. He was also the author of a number of HYMNS; Saint Augustine credits him with the introduction of hymn singing in the West.
MIDDLE AGES: The most important figure in the reformation and codification of musical ritual of the Church was Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604. Though he is now admired more as an organizer than a creator, the common custom of referring to all sacred CHANT as "Gregorian" chant is a continuing tribute to his efforts in this field. Another figure of great importance for the orderly and uniform transmission of chant was the Benedictine monk GUIDO D'AREZZO. With the development of poetry in the vernacular, which made use of rhythmic accent and rhyme, a new body of music arose that was based on this poetry. Among the first pieces using Italian texts are the laude spirituali, the earliest of which date from the 13th century. The following century witnessed a remarkable flourishing of secular music, with important advances in rhythmic notation and POLYPHONY. Theorists of the time spoke of a new art--an ars nova. The earliest known notated polyphonic music in Italy comes from the 14th century. The principal forms were the MADRIGAL, the caccia (a piece dealing with the chase, or hunting), and the ballata. The outstanding composer of this period was Francesco LANDINI. Blind from childhood, Landini was widely admired as a poet, philosopher, and astrologer as well as a composer and performer on several instruments.
RENAISSANCE: During the 15th and much of the 16th century Italy functioned largely as an importer of musical talent. Nevertheless, toward the end of the 15th century, distinctively Italian secular music began to reappear at some of the Italian courts. In Florence, during the time of Lorenzo de'Medici (1448-92), carnival celebrations were enriched by canti carnascialeschi (carnival songs). In Mantua composers developed the frottola, a homophonic (chordal), clearly phrased, strophic piece. The carnival songs and frottole were significant in preparing the ground for the 16th-century madrigal, one of the great flowerings of Italian musical art. In the earlier part of the 16th century madrigals were written by French and Netherlandish composers as well as Italians such as Costanzo Festa (1490-1545). The late madrigal, written in the last third of the century, was dominated by the Italians Luca MARENZIO, Carlo GESUALDO, and Claudio MONTEVERDI. Sacred music developed in two main centers--Rome and Venice. The Roman school is epitomized in the works of Giovanni Pierluigi da PALESTRINA. Working under the influence of the Counter Reformation, Palestrina wrote several hundred motets and 105 masses. The Venetian school had its founding father in the Flemish composer Adrian WILLAERT, who was director of music at Saint Mark's Cathedral from 1527 to 1562. Willaert, his student Andrea Gabrieli, and Andrea's nephew Giovanni Gabrieli developed a polychoral (multiple choruses) style of composition that gave special force to the contrast and opposition (both spatial and aural) of mixed groups of performers. Venice was also an important center of music printing from as early as the beginning of the 16th century. The Odhecaton, printed by Ottaviano dei Petrucci in 1501, is the first printed collection of part songs. Petrucci printed more than 50 volumes of secular and sacred vocal music as well as a few volumes of music for the lute.
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BAROQUE: The period of Italy's greatest musical influence throughout Europe lasted from the end of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century. During this time new attitudes toward the relationship of text and music and toward the states of mind most suitable for expression in music generated changes in the treatment of dissonance, rhythm, and texture. The resulting style of the baroque music affected old genres and brought forth several new ones, such as the opera, oratorio, cantata, concerto, and sinfonia. The earliest operas that have survived complete are Euridice by Jacopo PERI and Giulio CACCINI, performed in Florence in 1600, and Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo by Emilio de Cavalieri (c.1550-1602), performed in Rome in 1600. Peri, Caccini, and Cavalieri were all associated with a group of Florentine humanists called the Camerata, who hoped to achieve in their own time the great effects attributed to music by the ancient Greeks. To accomplish this goal they instituted a style of reciting in music, the stile recitativo (recitative), that allowed the text to be projected with clarity. The voice was accompanied by chords notated in a shorthand called figured bass. The full expressive possibilities of the new style were first demonstrated by Monteverdi in his opera Orfeo (1607). Rome was a center of operatic composition from about 1620 until the late 1630s. In 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, and until the end of the 17th century, Venice was the operatic capital of Italy. Some of the finest Venetian operas were written by Monteverdi and his pupil Pier Francesco CAVALLI.
Other offspring of the new style were the cantata, similar to an operatic scene, and the oratorio, a musical presentation of a sacred subject. One of the characteristics of baroque music was the development of an idiomatic style of writing for various instruments. The greatest keyboard composer at the turn of the 17th century was Girolamo FRESCOBALDI, organist at Saint Peter's in Rome. Throughout the baroque era Italy was preeminent both in the manufacture of violins and in the composition and performance of music for them. Some of the greatest violin makers of all times flourished in that age; they were members of the AMATI, STRADIVARI, and GUARNERI families, all of whom worked in Cremona. The texture that was favored in the second half of the 17th century called for two treble instruments, most often violins, and a melodic bass instrument such as the cello with a keyboard instrument filling in the harmonies. The term trio sonata designated music written for such an ensemble, and some of the finest examples were written by Arcangelo CORELLI. Orchestral music also had its origins in the baroque era.
The interest in exploiting contrasting masses of sound was brought to fruition in the concerto. The term concerto grosso describes a piece built on the contrast between a larger and a smaller group of instruments; Corelli composed some of the best examples of the genre. The most important composers in the development of the solo concerto, which contrasts a single player with a group, were Giuseppe TORELLI, Tommaso ALBINONI, and Antonio VIVALDI. The most important composer of operas at the turn of the century was Alessandro Scarlatti, who wrote more than 100. Opera seria was cultivated by German composers as well as Italians such as Niccolo JOMMELLI and Tommaso Traetta (1727-79). Comic opera made great advances in the hands of Giovanni PERGOLESI, Niccolo PICCINNI, Giovanni PAISIELLO, and Domenico CIMAROSA. Instrumental music was not abandoned in the second half of the 18th century. The Milanese composer Giovanni Battista SAMMARTINI won international fame for his symphonies. The concerto was cultivated by Giovanni Battista VIOTTI, an Italian working in France and England. Luigi BOCCHERINI, an Italian who spent much of his career in Spain, wrote a large quantity of chamber music.
19TH CENTURY: The most commanding figure in Italian opera at the beginning of the 19th century was Gioacchino ROSSINI. In two decades Rossini created nearly 40 operas, fairly evenly divided between the serious and the comic genres. He is best known for his comic masterpiece The Barber of Seville (1816). Rossini's last opera, William Tell (1829), was written for Paris, where he resided from 1824 until 1837 and from 1855 until his death in 1868. After Rossini's premature withdrawal from operatic composition, two younger men, Vincenzo BELLINI and Gaetano DONIZETTI, came to prominence. Bellini's art is one of refined and expressive lyricism, although in his best works, such as Norma (1831), dramatic values are not neglected. Donizetti's more robust temperament was at home both in comic works such as Don Pasquale (1843) and tragic works such as Lucia di Lammermoor (1835).
For a half century, beginning in the 1840s, Italian opera was dominated by Giuseppe VERDI, the representative of the musical and the nationalistic aspirations of the Italian people. Verdi's career unfolded during the period in which Italy finally achieved independence and unification; many of his operas dramatize, implicitly or explicitly, the struggle against tyranny and oppression. Verdi frequently drew the plots of his operas from the works of the finest European playwrights--among them Hugo, Schiller, and Shakespeare. The best known Verdi operas include Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), La Traviata (1853), Aida (1871), and Otello (1887). Most of his works are tragic, but his final opera, Falstaff (1893), is a comedy. The librettist for Otello and Falstaff was Arrigo BOITO, a significant composer in his own right, whose major work is the opera Mefistofele (1868). The heroic operas of Verdi gave way in the 1890s to a style known as VERISMO (realism), which emphasized sordid settings and violent contrasts. The landmark works of verismo are Pietro MASCAGNI's Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Ruggero LEONCAVALLO's I Pagliacci (1892), but it was Giacomo PUCCINI who achieved the most continuous success. Puccini was an accomplished eclectic composer with an astute sense of the theater. He blends veristic elements with sentimentality in La Boheme (1896), with fancy costumes in Tosca (1900), and with exoticism in Madama Butterfly (1904).
20TH CENTURY: Of the generation of composers who came to maturity at the turn of the 20th century, the most significant were Gian Francesco MALIPIERO, Ildebrando PIZZETTI, Ottorino RESPIGHI, and Alfredo Casella (1883-1947). These men had in common an interest in the renewal and active cultivation of instrumental music, which had been comparatively neglected in the 19th century. In a clear rejection of the works of the verismo composers, they turned for their inspiration to compositions of the Italian Renaissance and baroque period or to Gregorian chant. The most important representatives of the next generation, Luigi DALLAPICCOLA and Goffreddo PETRASSI, manifested in their works closer contacts with contemporary composers outside of Italy. Petrassi was most influenced by Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky. Dallapiccola, once he became acquainted with the works of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, incorporated TWELVE-TONE techniques into a distinct personal style.
TODAY: Italian composers today are working in virtually all the current trends -- SERIAL MUSIC, ELECTRONIC MUSIC, ALEATORY MUSIC, and collage techniques. Most prominent among the avant-garde composers have been Bruno MADERNA, Luigi NONO, Luciano BERIO, and Sylvano Bussotti).