Discussion The first surviving stage work comes from Italy in the year 1600 with Jacopo Peri's Euridice. The true star of opera from the 1600s, though, is Claudio Monteverdi. His first opera was L'Orfeo, also about the Orpheus and Euridice story. The Italians of the time, in the middle of the Renaissance, were fascinated with Ancient Greece and had wanted to replicate what they thought was the Ancient Greek melodrama, complete with chorus. And thus composers and performers created opera. The initial style was with recitatives, which was essentially speech in song. Over time, the beauty of the music and the singing took precedence and arias became popular. From the mid-1600s through about the mid-1800s, most operatic compositions were a mix of recitatives and arias. All of Mozart's operas were filled with a mix of recitatives and arias. In the Romantic era, as the music itself transformed into storytelling, the orchestra and its contribution rose to higher prominence. Richard Wagner revolutionized operatic composing. There are no arias in his operas. The music is considered through-composition wherein the music goes from one theme to another without stoppage. Arias, on the other hand, were considered songs that could be sung separately outside the opera itself. The Italian composers of the late 1700s and the 1800s created bel canto, or beautiful singing, in which the arias, particularly for the sopranos, became extraordinary and complex. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Italian opera used verismo, or true or real, in which the singing was meant to be more like the way people actually talked, so the story would flow better than these breaks for complex arias. 20th and 21st century opera is filled with more atonality and spectralism, such as from Thomas Ades and Kaija Saariaho. For more,
Operas and Musicals
Operas and Musicals
Operas and Musicals
Discussion The first surviving stage work comes from Italy in the year 1600 with Jacopo Peri's Euridice. The true star of opera from the 1600s, though, is Claudio Monteverdi. His first opera was L'Orfeo, also about the Orpheus and Euridice story. The Italians of the time, in the middle of the Renaissance, were fascinated with Ancient Greece and had wanted to replicate what they thought was the Ancient Greek melodrama, complete with chorus. And thus composers and performers created opera. The initial style was with recitatives, which was essentially speech in song. Over time, the beauty of the music and the singing took precedence and arias became popular. From the mid-1600s through about the mid-1800s, most operatic compositions were a mix of recitatives and arias. All of Mozart's operas were filled with a mix of recitatives and arias. In the Romantic era, as the music itself transformed into storytelling, the orchestra and its contribution rose to higher prominence. Richard Wagner revolutionized operatic composing. There are no arias in his operas. The music is considered through-composition wherein the music goes from one theme to another without stoppage. Arias, on the other hand, were considered songs that could be sung separately outside the opera itself. The Italian composers of the late 1700s and the 1800s created bel canto, or beautiful singing, in which the arias, particularly for the sopranos, became extraordinary and complex. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Italian opera used verismo, or true or real, in which the singing was meant to be more like the way people actually talked, so the story would flow better than these breaks for complex arias. 20th and 21st century opera is filled with more atonality and spectralism, such as from Thomas Ades and Kaija Saariaho. For more,