Monteverdi In Venice

"Monteverdi in Venice also contains a discussion of performance practice, shedding light on the odd distortions of the composer's musical habits produced by today's fads and fashions. His vocal works, meant to be performed one or two voices to a part, are consistently given by massed choirs. His music is willfully transposed, although there is not a shred of evidence to prove that they were ever interfered with. Most of the instruments used in modern renderings are hopelessly wrong from a tonal point of view."--BOOK JACKET.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.

"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics can shed new light on Monteverdi’s two Venetian operas (and their respective librettos, by Badoaro and Busenello), not only at the levels of textual criticism, historical exegesis, and dramaturgy, but also with regard to concrete choices of performance, staging, and mise-en-scène. Following an Introduction setting up the interdisciplinary agenda, the volume comprises two main parts: ‘Contexts and Sources’ deals with the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts of the works - librettos and scores; 'Performance and Interpretation’ offers critical and historical insights regarding the casting, singing, reciting, staging, and conducting of the two operas. This volume will appeal to scholars and researchers in Opera Studies and Music History as well as be of interest to early music performers and all those involved with presenting opera on stage.

A comprehensive edition of Monteverdi's letters which span the years 1601-43 and give an unrivalled picture of the composer's life in Mantua, Venice and Parma, his thoughts on the aesthetics of opera, his colleagues, and his own works. Extensive commentaries introduce each letter.

George Frideric Handel was born and educated in Germany, flourished in Italy, and chose to become British. One of the most cosmopolitan of the great composers, much of Handel's music has remained in the popular repertory since his lifetime, and a broad variety of his music theatre works from Italian operas to English oratorios have experienced a dramatic renaissance since the late twentieth century. A large number of publications devoted to Handel's life and music have appeared from his own time to the present day, but The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia gathers the full range of present knowledge and leading scholarship into a single volume for convenient and illuminating reference. Packed with well over 700 informative and accessible entries, both long and short, this book is ideal for performers, scholars, students and music lovers who wish to explore the Handelian world.

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. Monteverdi s 1607 version of the legend of Orpheus is arguably the first masterpiece of opera. Composed for the court of Mantua, where Monteverdi was employed, it is very different from his two other surviving operas, which he wrote more than30 years later to entertain Venetian audiences in the first public opera houses. Orfeo was long considered untranslatable, because the text is so closely tied to the music, and the Venetian librettos owe some of their brilliance to Spanish Golden Age theatre. This opera guide is an opportunity to read all three of Monteverdi s stage works together, in Anne Ridler s graceful translations."

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, it is aimed at students, performers and music-lovers in general and adds significantly to our understanding of Monteverdi's music, his life, and the contexts in which he worked. Chapters offering overviews of his output of sacred, secular and dramatic music are complemented by 'intermedi', in which contributors examine individual works, or sections of works in detail. The book draws extensively on Monteverdi's letters and includes a select discography/videography and a complete list of Monteverdi's works together with an index of first lines and titles.

Claudio Monteverdi is now recognized as the towering figure of a critical transitional moment of Western music history: relentless innovator in every genre within chamber, church and theatre music; self-proclaimed leader of a 'new dispensation' between words and their musical expression; perhaps even 'Creator of Modern Music'. During recent years, as his arrestingly attractive music has been brought back to life in performance, so too have some of the most outstanding musicologists focussed intensely on Monteverdi as they worked through the 'big' questions in the historiography and hermeneutics of early Baroque music, including musical representation of language; compositional theory; social, institutional, cultural and gender history; performance practices and more. The 17 articles in this volume have been selected by Richard Wistreich to exemplify the best scholarship in English and because each, in retrospect, turns out to have been a ground-breaking contribution to one or more significant strands in Monteverdi studies.

Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general. Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions—musical, dramatic, practical—that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.