1622–73, French The playwright, actor and impresario Molière was the brightest star in seventeenth-century French theatre, writing plays that lived on long after his time, some of them in the form of operas. In all, 17 of Molière’s plays have been turned into 75 operas since 1706, over half of them in the twentieth century. ...
Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...
1818–93, French Charles Gounod almost became a priest, and his first works comprised church music. However, the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), a member of the Garcia operatic family, perceived Gounod’s potential and persuaded him compose opera. Eventually, he wrote 12 of them. Gounod composed Sapho (1851) for Viardot, but it did not make a distinctive ...
1632–87, French Jean-Baptiste Lully was a French composer with an Italian background. He was born in Florence on 28 November 1632. His original name, later gallicized, was Giovanni Battista Lulli. In 1646, aged 14, he was placed with a noble household in Paris as a singer, dancer and violinist, and he became familiar with ...
(Zhan Ba-test’ Lü-le’) 1632–87 French composer Lully was an Italian by birth, but as a youth he accompanied the Chevalier de Guise to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1653, Lully danced with the young King Louis XIV in the Ballet de la nuit, and it was from this point that he began ...
c. 1645–1704, French Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a Parisian, was on hand to step into the breach after Lully quarrelled with the French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622–73), whose works Lully had been setting to music. As a result, Charpentier wrote the music for Molière’s Le mariage forcé (‘The Forced Marriage’, 1672) and Le malade imaginaire (‘The Hypochondriac’, 1673). ...
(Märk An-twan’ Shar-pont-ya’) 1643–1704 French composer Charpentier studied in Italy during the 1660s. There he familiarized himself with the instrumental and vocal forms of Carissimi and, above all, that of the oratorio. When he returned to Paris he joined the musicians of the Duchess of Guise and in 1673 became associated with Molière’s Comédie Française. In 1687, Charpentier composed ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The commedia dell’arte, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century, was a forerunner of opera. The influence of commedia dell’arte was evident in both the cast lists and the plots of operas. There were, for example, slapstick sequences called zanni and comic servants, an elderly parent or guardian, usually named Pantalone, and his ...
With the arrival of the new musical drama in the Baroque era, the voice became one of the most powerful instruments in the musical repertory during this period and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in France. Under Louis XIV, who took full power in 1661 and reigned until 1715, France experienced a renaissance of artistic and literary ...
c. 1627–98, Italian Poet and librettist Count Nicolo Minato wrote 11 texts for the Venetian opera houses, including Cavalli’s Pompeo Magna (‘Pompey the Great’, 1666). In 1669, the Emperor of Austria, Leopold I, appointed Minato his court poet, and some very exciting opportunities opened up for the count. At that time, the court composer ...
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