The Evolution of Opera Performance from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the Nineteenth Century

"The presentation of the book The Evolution of Opera Performance, from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the 19th Century, offers a synthesis of our work as a musical theatre director. Our aim is to stimulate the public’s interest in the opera genre and opera staging, by revealing aspects in the history of opera performance(s), as they have been shaped, century after century, by following the gradual effort and the tireless passion of its creators. Our aims are also to illustrate the original charm and the infinite resources of this genre, which continues to delight the public at large and the knowledgeable even today. Keywords: opera performance, opera staging, liturgical drama, vernacular drama, secular drama, dramatic madrigal, intermedi, the Florentine Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi, comédies-ballets, tragédie en musique, semi-opera, opera seria, the comic opera, opera buffa, ópera comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, tonadilla, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "

The Elements of Contemporary Turkish Composers’ Solo Piano Works Used in Piano Education

It is thought that to be successful in piano education it is important to understand how composers composed their solo piano works. In order to understand contemporary music, it is considered that the definition of today’s changing music understanding is possible with a closer examination of the ideas of contemporary composers about their artistic productions. For this reason, the qualitative research method was adopted in this study and the data obtained from the semi-structured interviews with 7 Turkish contemporary composers were analyzed by creating codes and themes with “Nvivo11 Qualitative Data Analysis Program”. The results obtained are musical elements of currents, styles, techniques, composers and genres that are influenced by contemporary Turkish composers’ solo piano works used in piano education. In total, 9 currents like Fluxus and New Complexity, 3 styles like Claudio Monteverdi, 5 techniques like Spectral Music and Polymodality, 5 composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Guillaume de Machaut and 9 genres like Turkish Folk Music and Traditional Greek are reached. It is thought that the results will contribute to the field because it will cause a better understanding in the artistic viewpoints of contemporary composers, as well as being a step for the piano and music educators and the students who have studied academic piano education in order for them to be able to understand the contemporary music.

The ethical power of music in the 'Ave Maria' motet by Claudio Monteverdi

Since ancient times, the concept of ethos has been a distinguished part of cultural heritage, living in various spheres of social, cultural, intellectual and religious life. During the Renaissance, the encounter of rhetorical categories and Christian doctrine opened the space for the manifestation of ethos in sacred music. Ethos is important as a rhetorical category, therefore, as a way to achieve persuasiveness, in which the theory of ethos of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus will be consulted. Following this theory, which was also known in the Renaissance, a series of counterpoint methods will take form, which may indicate the manifestation of certain subcategories of ethos in music. Having in mind Hermogenes' concept of ethos on the one hand, and the significance of ethos in the Christian figure of Mary on the other, this paper examines a chain of manifestations and, given Hermogenes' subcategories, offers an in-depth reading of the text and music in the motet from the end of the 16th century. It is an early work of Claudio Monteverdi on the words of the Ave Maria prayer, which, according to its religious function and meaning, represents not only a concise appeal to the ethos of believers, but also the ethical foundation of Marian devotions.

Claudio Monteverdi: Disonancia y a(e)fecto

El presente texto plantea una reflexión entre el uso de las disonancias por Claudio Monteverdi y la idea de sujeto sensible durante la primera mitad del siglo XVII. Para dicho propósito se realiza una revisión de las categorías propuestas por Christoph Bernhard en su Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (1660). A manera de cierre, se espera que se pueda hacer notoria la relación entre los conceptos de afectos o pasiones y las disonancias empleadas por Monteverdi.

“If Music is Not a Memory, then what is it?”: on the Modern Approach to Musical Memory in Azio Corghi’s Creations

The article draws attention to the music of Azio Corghi (b. 1932), a modern Italian composer, hardly known in Russia. His artistic world is organically integrated into one of the characteristic features of modern culture: its inextricable link with the memory of the past. The composer demonstrates his own, original approach to musical memory – an artistic dialogue with it through the use of excerptions from various works of the past. According to the composer it allows him to “re-discover and re-read the past in the spirit of modernity”. This Corghi’s method is defined in the article with the help of the term riletture (Ital. re-reading), invented by the Italian musicologist Raffaele Mellace. Among a large number of works of this kind, as a specific example, the author considers the dramatic cantata “...fero dolore” – on Pianto della Madonna and Lamento d’Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi, for female voice, viola (oboe d’amour), percussion and string instruments

Echoes of Ariadne in the Musical Reception of Ariosto and Tasso

This article discusses Fulvio Testi's libretto “L'isola di Alcina” (1626), based on Ariosto's “Orlando furioso.” After considering its significance to the cultural politics of the Este and the author's preoccupations with poetical and political lineage, the essay focuses on the sorceress Alcina's lament in act 4 and its afterlife in the Baroque cantata repertoire. Echoes from Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini's “Arianna” as well as the memory of the sorceress Armida from Torquato Tasso's “Gerusalemme liberata” are crucial to the gradual reshaping that, across poetry and music, transforms the evil character into a woman worthy of the audience's sympathy.

Nimfa, Ariadna, Licori. Kształtowanie kobiecej tożsamości w dziełach Claudia Monteverdiego

This article analyses the way of setting lament and the theme of madness to music in the first half of the seventeenth century, on the example of the works of Claudio Monteverdi. At that time the way of expressing states on the verge of madness was the lament as a distinctive musical form in the course of the composition. The discussion takes as its point of departure one of the most famous examples of lament from early seventeenth century, Claudio Monteverdi’s The Nymph’s Lament – an emotional outburst by the eponymous heroine, held within bounds by a chorus of male voices. The work is analysed in its musical aspect as well as in the context of the “video clip” advertising Anna Prohaska’s album Enchanted Forest. An example of a lament by Monteverdi using other musical techniques is the monologue from the opera Arianna by its heroine, which became the model for later laments. Symbolically it presents a woman’s unsuccessful struggle for her right to individuality and the cultural role of arranged marriage. Its shape is influenced by the commedia dell’arte tradition. The first opera directly concerned with the theme of madness is Monteverdi’s La finta pazza Licori. Also in this case inspiration came from commedia dell’arte. Even though this work was not completed, the available versions allow us to reconstruct the composer’s intentions and to show how the theme of madness came to make its appearance on operatic stages.