Tag Archives: L’Orfeo
At the end of 19th century it became clear that the style used in opera until 1890s couldn’t be used any more: the great social and cultural changes demanded new ways to express and increase the dramatic tension. The music coming from abroad (oltr’alpe-beyond the Alps) was becoming increasingly important. The new younger generation of composers, such as Puccini and Mascagni, where influenced not only by Wagner but also by younger composers such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss. Pelléas et Melisande premiered in 1902, Salome (1905) and Electra (1909), Strauss’s two breaking through operas, had a rapid success. Change demanded from older composers a conscious and radical effort while for those born after 1875 and used to the new music as part of their musical landscape, the transition to new ways of composing operas was more spontaneous, although different in nature and magnitude for each composer. Some composer intended their relationship with nineteenth-century Italian opera as “evolutionary” and continued to work within the traditional framework using at times new techniques and dramatic themes. Others felt that Italian music needed to break free from an opera that had become a stale entertainment for the new middle class and that a […]
The Neapolitan school and the trumph of the classical style Domenico Cimarosa’s successes are a prove of the fact that the revolutionary charge of Mozart’s operas wasn’t fully understood by his contemporaries. The secret marriage is regarded as the masterpiece of the comic Neapolitan School and has been almost constantly performed since its composition; yet its characters don’t have a naturalness or a psychological definition comparable to that of Mozart’s. An unmatched reputation as a composer Cimarosa was however the best of his time for his ability of setting into fine music ordinary-life stories. He gave voice to real people with their passions and anxieties, reveiling their true heart. Through the refined melodies of his arias, his characters describe their actions and emotions with freshness and effectiveness. Cimarosa wrote a total of 99 operas filled with delightful pages, graceful melodies and funny and profoundly human characters. In the last years of his life and before Rossini became famous, his reputation as a composer was unmatched. Cimarosa, a brief biography Domenico Cimarosa was born in Aversa, nearby Caserta on the 17th December 1749. Just a few days after his birth his family moved to Naples, as his father was hired for the construction of […]
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.
Operatic voices are divided into 4 categories: soprano (high female), alto (low female), tenor (high male) and bass (low male). There are also 2 intermediate voices: mezzo soprano, female voice and baritone, male voice between tenor and bass. There are many more subtle distinctions used to define the range, tone, colour and timbre of a voice. They developed as a consequence of increasingly demanding roles which required more specific vocal types.
