Chapter 9home.lagrange.edu/mturner/musichistory/Chapter_9.pdfChapter 9 Vocal Music 1650-1750 Sunday,...

Chapter 9Vocal Music1650-1750

Sunday, October 21, 12

Opera

• beyond Italy, opera was slow to develop

• France, Spain, and England enjoyed their own forms of dramatic entertainment with music


Opera France: Comédie-ballet and Tragédie en musique

• Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), established sung drama that was part opera and part ballet

• wrote a series of comédie-ballet for dancing talents of his master, Loius XIV

• mixed spoken drama and dance



• in 1672, Lully created new operatic genre: tragédie en musique (also know as tragédie lyrique)

• drew on classical mythology and chivalric romances with plots being veiled favorable commentaries on recent court events



• Tragédie en musique consisted of:

• an overture

• an allegorical prologue

• five acts of entirely sung drama, each divided into several scenes

• many divertissements (interludes)



• Lully Armide

- tragédie en musique (also called tragédie lyrique)

- French Overture (section with slow dotted rhythms followed by faster imitative section)

- the aria uses figured bass and moves freely between meters to accommodate the French language


Opera Italy: Opera seria

• Opera seria (serious opera)

• usually tragic content

• the most important type of opera cultivated from 1670-1770

• developed in Italy and sung almost exclusively in Italian

• became an international genre



• libretto draws subject matter from classical antiquity

• rulers presented in favorable light: heroic, magnanimous, placing duty and honor above personal gain

• texts balance drama and music with mixture of action (recitative) and reflection (aria)



• majority of arias are da capo arias

• name comes from indication at tend of second section: da capo (from the head)

• having finished B section, the performer goes back to beginning of A and continues to the end of that section (fine often in score)



• recitativo semplice (simple recitative) accompanied by basso continuo for extended passages of prose

• arias tend to be dramatically static but psychologically revealing

• recitativo accompagnato (accompanied recitative) supported by full orchestral for moments of high emotion and drama



• Handel Guilio Cesare Act I, Scene 5-7

- Scene 5:

- secco (dry) recitative followed by a da capo aria

- Scene 6:

- secco recitative followed by da capo aria

- the aria uses an instrumental ritornello

- Scene 7:

- uses recitativo accompagnato (accompanied recitative) reserved for moments of high emotion and drama

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orfVtWfHs2Q



• da capo aria offered singers a way for demonstrating vocal prowess with very high or low notes, fast passages, rapid ornaments

• castrato - young boys with promising voices underwent castration preventing change of voice at puberty; combined the high range of the female voice with physical power of male voice


The castrato.This early 18th-century caricature

lampoons two well-known tendencies of castrati: to put on weight and to sing

fantastically elaborate passagework.



• establishment of first public opera houses in Venice in 1638

• new audience demanded new kinds of performance spaces and imposed new economics

• without direct support of court or church, opera established itself on a for-profit basis


Opera England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera

• masques began as semi-improvised intrusions into large social festivities by masked and costumed actors

• masques migrated to stage as loosely assembled series of vignettes that allowed for colorful mixture of musical and dramatic elements



• semi-operas flourished in the second half of the 17th century

• essentially plays with a large proportion of vocal and instrumental musical numbers



• Purcell Dido and Aeneas from Act I

- Purcell borrows much from French opera

- no da capo arias

- not particularly virtuosic

- likely written for a girls school in Chelsea



• 17th century was time of political unrest in England and circumstances were not favorable to introduction of opera from abroad



• ballad opera - play with music that portrayed common criminals rather than mythological figures or historical heros



• John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch excerpts from The Beggar’s Opera

- spoken dialog

- simple songs

- original libretto featured 69 songs of which 28 have been identified as English ballads


Sacred Music Music in Convents

• families sent daughters to convents for a variety of reasons: mostly economic - convent dowry cost was a fraction of cost to marry daughter into respectable family

• more than half of women who published music in Italy between 1566 and 1700 were nuns


Sacred Music Oratorio

• sacred counterpoint to opera presenting a dramatic scene from Bible or from lives of saints

• genre of sung drama performed without staging or costume

• music for projecting the drama includes recitative, da capo aria and chorus


Oratorio

• Carissimi Jephte

- one of the most popular early oratorios

- since there is no staging, a narrator is often used to weave the story together for the audience. In Jephte, “Historicus” is the narrator.


Sacred Music Motet, Mass and Cantata

• Motet and Mass:

- polyphonic motet continued to thrive throughout the Continent

• Handel Zadok the Priest (1727)

- Anthem for the coronation of King George II in 1727

- recall that Bonds defined an Anthem as a motet in English



• Cantata

- throughout Baroque era, the term cantata was applied to many different kinds of sacred and secular vocal works

• Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre Judith (1708)

- cantata performed by one singer and basse continue plus obbligato violin


Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach holds in his hand a copy of his Canon Triplex, BWV 1076.



• J.S. Bach Jesu, der du meine Seele (BWV. 78)

- cantata

- 1st mvmt. uses a Ritornello form

- 2nd mvmt. da capo aria (with a ritornello)

- 5th mvmt. uses text painting

- 7th mvmt. is a Chorale type setting


Conceptions of the Compositional Process

• almost every composer of 17th and 18th centuries borrowed musical themes and sometimes entire pieces from others

• almost every composer recycled an earlier work into a new composition


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