Castor et Pollux was considered Rameau’s greatest achievement after he revised it in 1754. The storyline revolves around the generosity of one twin brother willing to forsake his unique immortality so that the other may live, but their complex situation creates strong portraits of inner conflict and tension between other characters, Rameau conveys the magical forces of Hades, ...
Rameau’s magnificent Hippolyte et Aricie is a rare example of a major composer’s first attempt at opera also being one of his greatest achievements. However, Rameau was nearly 50 years old and already a respected and experienced musician when he composed it, and had evidently been contemplating the project for several years. The impressive literary quality of Pellegrin’s libretto ...
‘The Gallant Indians’ Composed in 1735, Les indes galantes is an opéra-ballet in which each act has its own setting and self-contained plot. Its four entrées include a scene set in a Turkish garden, Incas worshipping the sun in a Peruvian desert, a flower festival at a Persian market and a village ceremony in a North American forest. ...
(Zhan Fi-lep’ Ra-mo’) 1683–1764 French composer and theorist Rameau was born in Dijon, where he was first taught music by his father. During his early years he held organist’s posts in several places, including Avignon and Clermont-Ferrand, Paris (where he published his first harpsichord pieces in 1706), Dijon (1709), Lyons (c. 1713), and once more at Clermont-Ferrand (1715). He ...
1683–1764, French A respected theorist and composer of keyboard music, Rameau did not compose his first opera until he was 50 years old. Consistently adventurous in his operas, he equally inspired passionate admiration and hostility from Parisian audiences and was a comparably powerful figure between the 1730s and 1750s. The Wanderlust Years Rameau was born at Dijon in ...
(Fe-lep’ da Mon’-ta) 1521–1603 Flemish composer In his early years Monte travelled in Italy and, although his maturity was spent at the Habsburg court, he became one of the most prolific composers of Italian madrigals, publishing more than 1,100 of them. His career lasted for over 50 years, making him a good measure of changing tastes in ...
(Fe-lep’ de Ve-tre’) 1291–1361 French theorist and composer As a result of his treatise Ars nova (c. 1322) Philippe de Vitry was the most musically influential figure of his day. It described new developments in mensural notation, allowing composers more rhythmic flexibility and therefore compositional variety. Unfortunately, no songs known to be by Vitry have survived, but a number ...
1635–88, French Philippe Quinault was a well-known playwright when he decided to switch to the writing of opera libretti. The techniques of plays and operas – spoken and sung drama – diverged considerably, but Quinault succeeded in transferring his skills from one genre to the other. It was risky, but the star prize was collaboration with Lully, ...
(Fe-lep’ Vâr-da-lo’) c. 1480s–1530s French composer Although French by birth and the composer of chansons and motets, Verdelot travelled to Italy early in his life, and is best known as one of the founders of the madrigal. He seems to have composed most, if not all, his madrigals in the 1520s, the genre’s first decade. Many of ...
The first half of the nineteenth century was essentially a period of insurgence in Europe, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the series of uprisings that rocked the continent around 1848. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was also underway, beginning in Britain, then spreading south through the rest of Europe. With these two strands of revolution came ...
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 ...
‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...
The flute most familiar to us from its use in orchestral and solo music is more properly known as a ‘transverse’ or ‘side-blown’ flute. The flute family is distinct from the other woodwind instruments in that it does not use a reed to generate sound. Instead, a stream of air striking the edge of an opening in the side of ...
The xylophone (the name means ‘sounding wood’) is a percussion instrument consisting of a series of wooden bars of ascending size, capable of producing a range of notes when struck. It originated possibly in Asia or Africa; an instrument thought to be of Chinese origin fell into the hands of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). Early instruments consisted of blocks strung together ...
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 ...
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