The development of this declamatory/musical form allowed theorists to make extensive comparisons to rhetoric. Recitative stood for the rediscovered language of that archetypal man, opera for the rediscovered country of that idyllic and heroically pure species. Quoted in Chanan, Nietzche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy ( Ref. What resulted was recitative and the results were more like heightened declamation, a kind of musical speech rather than music. The text took precedence over the music as the music had to follow the contours of speech. The words were to be heard clearly and cleanly. In fact an opera contrary to modern opinion, was viewed as a drama with music on the side or Dramma per musica (drama through music). The composers of this period were preoccupied with ancient Greek drama and music. Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, for example, was set to a text of Rinuccini’s. The first phrase included the early operas that had direct humanist and Aristotelian influences from the Renaissance theorists like Dressler and humanist poets like Ottavio Rinuccini. If the Baroque period in music can be conveniently dated from 1600 to 1750 then Italian opera can be said to have three 50 year periods. This large vocal form was a daughter of the Baroque. Obviously it could not be applied to every little composition but in large vocal forms such as opera some of these elements are to be found. 3) This kind of abstract and rigid structure provided composers with a skeleton to work with. Almost two centuries later at the height of opera seria the composer and theorist Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), a good friend of George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), expanded this format to include narratio (statement of facts), propositio (forecast of the main points in the speaker’s favour), confirmatio (proof), confutatio (rebuttal), and conclusio. There had to be an exordium (opening), medium, and finis. Gallus Dressler adopted a speech-like organization for music in 1563. It was not a coincidence that opera developed with a relation to rhetoric since musical rhetorical theories were also being developed at this time. Music was a part of the Quadrivium of the Seven Liberal Arts and so had an academic history of relations to the artes dicendi (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic). Some persons fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a result of the sacred melodies - when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy - restored as though they had found healing and purgation.Įven at this early stage in operatic history connections between rhetoric and music were being made. Quoted in Hanning, Aristotle says in the Politics ( Ref. Melodies could move the soul the way a great orator could. Pathos is what Aristotle believed music to possess. Some Aristotelian influence can be detected at the time opera was being conceived in the late 16th century. In oratory an argument can be divided in an Aristotelian manner, the three parts being ethos, pathos, and logos. It is when the messages were no longer wanted that opera seria began its seemingly terminal decline. The peak of this serious style was reached with the polished libretti of Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782). Music and text were especially close in the way they meshed to create this. These three components act together to "teach" and edify the audience. There is a way of dividing opera into three parts: the text, the music, and the visual. 1) This claim then makes opera seria a rhetorical genre with a message to send across to the listeners. Germain Bazin suggests that "rhetoric was at the centre of baroque thinking and therefore all the arts". Other than France, with its own national opera, the Italian one was produced not only in Italy but in England, the German states, Spain, Hapsburg Austria, and other countries. What can account for the decline in interest? Opera seria or serious opera was the predominant type of Italian opera and musical form in the 18th century. The 1995 French/Belgium film Farinelli dealt specifically with one of the great castrato singers of Baroque Italian opera and in a way represents a peculiar surge of interest in this once ignored genre of music. Of that neglected half, the Italian operas of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the most ignored. The history of opera is not particularly long but when you consider that the origins of opera date from the early 17th century then one realizes that the "standard" repertoire excludes almost half of operatic history. Gluck (1714-1787) or the comic operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Until very recently the earliest operas one could hear were the "reform" operas by Christoph W. ( conceived at the University of British Columbia, March 11, 1996.Įighteenth-century opera is one part of the operatic repertoire that is rarely given a regular staging.
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