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Bellini | A love and death story I Capuleti e i Montecchi

I Capuleti e i Montecchi is considered by many Bellini’s first masterpiece. It certainly recalls in many ways the great belcanto era, particularly in the way the roles are organized: the mezzo-soprano as male protagonist, the soprano as his lover, the tenor as the hero’s rival, bass and bariton respectively as the noble father and the tyrant. However, Capuleti is not strictly a belcanto opera because of its intimate and at times dramatic atmosphere. So much so that the many embellishments, counterbalanced by a well-defined melodic core, are not ornamentation anymore but start to take an expressive connotation.

September

Opera | A Renaissance creation

The main difference between Opera and the previous polyphonic vocal music is the unique melodic line, resulting from the merging of bass and singing. In polyphonic music different vocal lines work independently, overlapping one another and making a text often incomprehensible. Opera instead offered a new way for making words expressive and intelligible, by creating a single melodic line, supported by an accompaniment.

December

Il Matrimonio Segreto by Domenico Cimarosa

Domenico Cimarosa’s most successful opera, The Secret Marriage, was composed on a libretto written by Giovanni Bertati, a Venetian employed as court poet in Vienna, on a subject very popular at the time. The story was in fact at the centre of a series of 6 paintings by William Hogarth, the Marriage in Fashion, le Mariage à la Mode, published in London between 1743 and 1745, depicting the bad consequences of a wedding between a penniless aristocrat and a rich bourgeois. Bertati the librettist turns the social satire into a mockery of bourgeois, eager to ennoble but happy to save half of the dowry when the opportunity arises.

January

Category Archives: Cities

Bellini | A love and death story I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Opera | A Renaissance creation

Il Matrimonio Segreto by Domenico Cimarosa

Italian Opera the January monthly program

Rimini and Gradara | Francesca da Rimini | The epitome of a tragic love

Rigoletto in Mantua | Palazzo Te, the pleasure palace

Bologna | A setting for Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto

Naples | City of music and magic

Verona | I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Rome, the Domus Aurea | Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea

Venice | the invention of public theatre

Opera | A Renaissance creation

L’Ulisse Errante

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