AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1669–1750, Italian The Venetian librettist Zeno was a librarian and historian, who sought to establish opera libretti as a recognized literary form. His first opera libretto, Lucio Vero, was a huge success at Venice in 1695. Zeno continued to write more libretti, although he had reservations about it affecting his scholarly credibility. In 1718, Zeno ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

c. 1670–1736, Italian Caldara was probably taught by Giovanni Legrenzi (1626–90) and was a choirboy at St Mark’s in Venice. His earliest operas were composed for Venice, while he was working as a cellist at St Mark’s. He was appointed maestro di cappella at Mantua to the last Gonzaga duke until about 1707, and then worked at Rome ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1678–1741, Italian Vivaldi’s father was a talented violinist who was employed at St Mark’s in Venice, and it is likely that his father was also involved in managing operas in that city during the late seventeenth century. Although Vivaldi was nominally a Catholic priest by profession, he did not have to say Mass for most of his life ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

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 ...

• Houses & Companies
• Late Baroque
• Opera

Literary clubs that were established in seventeenth-century Italy were commonly known as ‘academies’, taking their name from the Athenian garden where Plato was thought to have met with his followers. One of the most important such groups in the early eighteenth century was the Roman ‘Arcadian Academy’. It was formally established in 1690 to honour the late Queen Christina of Sweden ...

• Personalities
• Early Years
• Jazz & Blues

(Instrumental group, 1900–17) The Eagle Band, originally led by Buddy Bolden, was an extremely popular and influential New Orleans ensemble. Frankie Duson (or Dusen) (1880–1940), a powerful tailgate trombonist, joined the band in 1906 and went on to take over the band when Bolden suffered a mental collapse the following year. Subsequently, Duson employed various Bolden ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

c. 1660–c. 1728–44, Italian Little is known about Silvani’s life, but he was an abbot who issued his earliest works under the anagram Frencasco Valsini. Silvani regularly produced libretti for Venice between 1691 and 1716, and the title pages of the printed wordbooks state that he served the Duke of Mantua between 1699 and 1705. Silvani identified with ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

(Clarinet, alto saxophone, 1900–68) Lewis (born George Louis Francis Zeno) led bands in New Orleans in the 1920s, but he remained in the Crescent City while many of his colleagues headed north to Chicago, where the Jazz Age was being forged on the city’s South Side. Lewis did not record until the 1940s (in sessions that teamed ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1660–1741, German Fux studied music at Graz, and became a talented organist and church musician. He probably travelled to Italy during the 1680s, and his a capella Masses influenced by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–94) attracted the admiring attention of Emperor Leopold I in 1698. Based in Vienna for the remainder of his life, Fux was ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1665–1733, Italian Pariati was born in Reggio Emilia, and was secretary to the Duke of Modena. He spent time in Madrid, wrote works for Barcelona and spent three years in an Italian prison. He lived in Venice for 15 years, until he was appointed a court poet at Vienna in 1714. While in Venice he worked with ...

• Stage & Scene
• Classical Era
• Opera

The ‘doctrine of the affections’ was the main theory for the design of opera in the eighteenth century. Its name was not coined until the twentieth century, but the ideas behind it were discussed in the writings of theorists such as Johann Mattheson (1681–1764). These ideas were put into practice on stage by the famous librettists Zeno and, in ...