Opera

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By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with a public audience, or to celebrate a state event such as a ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The early nineteenth century was a period of insurgence in Europe, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the uprisings of around 1848. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain before spreading south to the rest of Europe, was also making its mark. These two strands of revolution transformed society, with a growing awareness of national identity, social development, growth of cities and important technological advances. All of these were ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The Enlightenment was a natural, if late, consequence of the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment advanced to be recognized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and brought with it new, controversial beliefs that upended the absolutisms on which European society had long been based. Absolute monarchy, with its reliance on the Divine Right of Kings, and the Church, with its demand ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The early nineteenth century was a period of insurgence in Europe, beginning with the French Revolution in 1789 to the uprisings in 1848. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain before spreading south to the rest of Europe, was also making its mark. These two strands of revolution caused transformations in society: growing awareness of national identity, social development, growth of cities and important technological advances – all of which ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
496 Words Read More

Although the art of the classical singer has traditionally been perceived as the pursuit of technical perfection and tonal beauty, the twentieth century enabled a re-evaluation of what that art should be. Due in part to the technological advances and harrowing events of the times, much of the music was innovative, challenging, moving, powerful and, in many cases, an assault on the senses and sensibilities of the listener. Accordingly, twentieth- ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Opera, with its unique blend of poetry, drama and music, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in ancient Greek theatre. The grandiose, all-encompassing music dramas of Verdi and Wagner may seem a world away from the era of Aristotle and Plato, but this noble civilization, which held music and theatre in high regard as both art forms and means of entertainment, was to play a crucial role ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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As part of the Renaissance (literally ‘rebirth’), which began in Italy in around 1450, the Baroque era was a revolution within a revolution. It saw a break from the Medieval view of humanity as innately sinful. Instead, Renaissance thinking cast individuals as a dynamic force in their own right and gave free rein to human imagination, ingenuity and self-expression. The Protestant movement, which rejected the ethos of the established Catholic ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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In 1891, when the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his famous words ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’, he had somehow managed to overlook the artistic realities of the late nineteenth century. By that time, after some 50 years of the High Romantic era, music and opera had brought real life on stage and had presented it in the raw, with all its disappointments, tragedies, insecurities, ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The traditions and styles of opera from Venice and Naples dominated operatic life in Rome, although for a short time public opera performances were forbidden in the papal city. The influence of Italian opera stretched much further, and companies were established outside Italy – most notably the Dresden opera house at the court of the Elector of Saxony, and in London by the Royal Academy of Music. It was only ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The schools of naturalism and realism had an immediate effect in Italy. With scant literary tradition to draw on from this period, Italian writers in the second half of the nineteenth century seized upon Zola’s beliefs as a potent dramatic source. The style they developed came to be known as verismo and was exemplified by writers such as Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. The characteristically veristic traits of strong local colour, ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The humanist principles of the Enlightenment removed opera from the extravagant world of baroque and landed it in entirely new territory. After 1720, Baroque became a target for changes initiated by the scholar Gian Vincenzo Gravina of the Arcadian Academy in Rome. Baroque operas based on classical myths had developed exaggerated and ultimately ludicrous forms. Under the Enlightenment principles that influenced Gravina and the Arcadians, these fripperies – the convoluted ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The Romantic period in opera, music, literature and art lasted more than a century overall, from around 1790 – the year after the French Revolution – to 1910, four years before the outbreak of the First World War. In this context, the meaning of ‘romantic’ went far beyond the usual amorous connotations: it stood for the imaginative, the exotic, the fantastic, even the occult. This new ethos drew a line ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding on to the last vestiges of a secure, civilized and supremely hierarchical culture. Early in the twentieth ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Opera began as an elite art. The first operas were created and performed for small, select audiences at wealthy courts in such cultural centres as Florence, Mantua, Parma and Rome. However, in 1637 the first public theatre in Venice, the Teatro San Cassiano opened, and the ‘invitation only’ nature of opera changed.  The Venetian opera houses were funded by the city’s patrician families, and paid for mostly by the sale of subscription ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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On the face of it, the French Revolution failed when the House of Bourbon returned to rule France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The face of it, however, was deceptive. The forces of liberalism unleashed by the Revolution had simply made a strategic withdrawal. In France, liberals, socialists and republicans remained opposed to extreme right-wing royalists, a situation duplicated throughout Europe where the ruling elites and the formerly ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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