‘The Coronation of Poppea’ L’incoronazione di Poppea, composed in 1642, has been called Monteverdi’s greatest opera. It was one of the first operas to be based on history rather than mythology. The action takes place in Rome in ad 65. The eponymous heroine is the mistress and, later, wife of the Emperor Nero. The libretto was by ...
‘Orpheus, a Legend in Music’ L’Orfeo, favola in musica consists of a prologue and five acts – a prolonged performance for its time. Monteverdi used several devices to extend the action of the opera. He wrote recitatives to be performed between the duets, as well as polyphonic madrigals, of which he was a master. Further additions included ...
1933–2014 Italian conductor Abbado studied in Milan and Vienna. He first conducted at La Scala, Milan in 1960 and held a number of posts there 1969–86. He was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra 1979–96, music director of the Vienna State Opera 1986–91, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 1990–2002. A renowned interpreter of Verdi ...
1903–91 Chilean pianist Arrau studied at Stern’s Conservatory in Berlin – where he taught 1924–40 – giving his first recital in 1914. He toured Europe in 1918, and gave concerts in Argentina and Chile in 1921. He made his London debut in 1922 and US in 1923. After founding a piano school in Santiago, he moved to New York. ...
1567–1643, Italian Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was born in Cremona and began his illustrious career as a choirboy in the town’s cathedral. By the time he was 20, he had already published the first of his eventual nine books of secular madrigals. He was also a skilled composer of motets. Monteverdi’s horizons expanded in 1591 when he joined the ...
(Klou’-dyo Mon-ta-ver’-de) 1567–1643 Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi stands as one of the last great composers of the Renaissance and one of the first of the Baroque. He studied composition with the madrigalist Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1547–92) in his home town of Cremona. When he took his first professional post in his mid-twenties, he had already published six books of music and ...
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 ...
The history of musical instruments has always been very closely linked to the history of music itself. New musical styles often come about because new instruments become available, or improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...
The first known examples of the recorder date from the Middle Ages. It became hugely popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and then, surpassed by the concert flute, it largely fell out of use in the professional arena. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it was redesigned by Arnold Dolmetsch and subsequently enjoyed a ...
A trombone is a brass instrument sounded by buzzing the lips into a mouthpiece. It is peculiar amongst brass instruments in using a double ‘U’-shaped slide to alter its pitch. The early history of the trombone is confused, mostly due to a lack of clarity in naming instruments. It is generally accepted that the immediate precursor to the trombone was ...
The trombone developed the idea of the Renaissance slide trumpet. While the trumpet abandoned the slide in favour first of crooks and later of valves, the trombone pursued the slide method and perfected it. The trombone is shaped like a giant paper-clip. While the left hand holds the instrument close to the mouth, the right hand grasps a crossbar; ...
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 ...
The revival and imitation of ancient theatrical genres in sixteenth-century Italy bore fruit in seventeenth-century England and France in the works of the great dramatists of those countries: William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In Italy, however, the sixteenth-century innovations in spoken drama were followed in the next century not by a great national ...
Classical ideals began to emerge and take shape in musical treatises in the late fifteenth century. One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music ...
‘That’s Women for You’ While Don Giovanni was the nineteenth century’s favourite Mozart opera, Così fan tutte, premiered on 26 January 1790, was widely considered frivolous, immoral and (not least by Beethoven) an insult to women. Today we can see it as perhaps the most ambivalent and disturbing of Mozart’s three Da Ponte comedies. In the composer’s ...
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