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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27 1756 – December 5, 1791) is among the most significant and enduringly popular composers of European classical music and is widely regarded as one of history's greatest composers. His enormous output includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Many of his works are part of the standard concert repertory and are widely recognized as masterpieces of the classical style.

Life

Family and early childhood years

Mozart was born in Salzburg to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart. He was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert's Cathedral. The baptismal record gives his name in Latinized form as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (Gottlieb) Mozart. Of these names, the first two were saint's names not employed in everyday life and the fourth was variously translated in Mozart's lifetime form as Amadeus (Latin), Gottlieb (German), and Amadé (French); Mozart himself preferred the third (see Mozart's name). Mozart's musical ability became apparent when he was about three years old. His father Leopold was one of Europe's leading musical pedagogues, whose influential textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule ("Essay on the fundamentals of violin playing") was published in 1756, the year of Mozart's birth. Mozart received intensive musical training from his father, including instruction in both clavier and violin.

The years of travel

violin Leopold realized that he could earn a substantial income by showcasing his son as a Wunderkind in the courts of Europe. Mozart soon gained fame as a musical prodigy capable of such feats as playing blindfolded or competently improvising at length on difficult passages. His older sister Maria Anna was a talented pianist and accompanied her brother on the earlier tours. Mozart wrote a number of piano pieces, in particular duets and duos, to play with her. On one occasion when Mozart became very ill, Leopold expressed more concern over the loss of income than over his son's well-being. Constant travel and cold weather may have contributed to his subsequent illness later in life. During his formative years, Mozart completed several journeys throughout Europe, beginning with an exhibition in 1762 at the Court of the Elector of Bavaria in Munich, then in the same year at the Imperial Court in Vienna. A long concert tour spanning three and a half years followed, taking him with his father to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zürich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. They went to Vienna again in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768. 1768 After one year in Salzburg, three trips to Italy followed: from December 1769 to March 1771, from August to December 1771, and from October 1772 to March 1773. During the first of these trips, Mozart met Andrea Luchesi in Venice and G.B. Martini in Bologna and was accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica. A highlight of the Italian journey, now an almost legendary tale, occurred when he heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; he thus produced the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Documents_describing_Mozart%27s_transcription_of_the_Allegri_Miserere source documents. In September 1777, accompanied by his mother, Mozart began a tour of Europe that included Munich, Mannheim, and Paris, where his mother died. During his trips, Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other great composers. A particularly important influence was Johann Christian Bach, who befriended Mozart in London in 1764–65. Bach's work is often taken to be an inspiration for the distinctive surface texture of Mozart's music, though not its architecture or drama. Even non-musicians caught Mozart's attention. He was so taken by the sound created by Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica that he composed several pieces of music for it.

Mozart in Vienna

In 1781 Mozart visited Vienna in the company of his employer, the harsh Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, and soon fell out with him. According to Mozart's own testimony, he was dismissed - literally - "with a kick in the seat of the pants." Mozart chose to settle and develop his career in Vienna after its aristocracy began to take an interest in him. On August 4, 1782, he married Constanze Weber (1763-1842) (also spelled "Costanze"), albeit against his father's wishes. Although they had six children, only two survived infancy. Neither of these two, Karl Thomas (1784–1858) and Franz Xaver Wolfgang (later a minor composer himself; 1791–1844), married or had children. 1782 was an auspicious year for Mozart's career; his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was a great success and he began a series of concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos as conductor and soloist. In 1782–83, Mozart became closely acquainted with the work of J.S. Bach and Handel as a result of the influence of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who owned many manuscripts of works by the Baroque masters. Mozart's study of these works led first to a number of works imitating Baroque style and later had a powerful influence on his own personal musical language, for example the fugal passages in Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute") and the 41st Symphony. In 1783, Wolfgang and Constanze visited Leopold in Salzburg, but the visit was not a success, as his father did not take to Constanze. However, the visit saw the composition of one of Mozart's great liturgical pieces, the Mass in C Minor, which was premiered in Salzburg, and is presently one of his best known works. In his early Vienna years, Mozart met Joseph Haydn and the two composers became friends. When Haydn visited Vienna, they sometimes played in an impromptu string quartet. Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782–85, and are often judged to be his response to Haydn's Opus 33 set from 1781. Haydn was soon in awe of Mozart, and when he first heard the last three of Mozart's series he told Leopold, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition." During the years 1782-1785, Mozart put on a series of concerts that featured performances by himself of his piano concertos, widely considered among his greatest works. These concerts were financially successful. After 1785 Mozart performed far less and wrote only a few concertos. Maynard Solomon conjectures that he may have suffered from hand injuries; another possibility is that the fickle public ceased to attend the concerts in the same numbers. As an adult, Mozart, influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, became a Freemason (1784). His lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than deistic one and he worked fervently and successfully to convert his father before the latter's death in 1787. His last opera, Die Zauberflöte, includes Masonic themes and allegory. He was in the same Masonic Lodge as Haydn. Mozart's life was fraught with financial difficulty and illness. Often, he received no payment for his work, and what sums he did receive were quickly consumed by his extravagant lifestyle. Mozart spent 1786 in Vienna in an apartment which may be visited today at Domgasse 5 behind St Stephen's Cathedral; it was here that Mozart composed Le nozze di Figaro. He followed this in 1787 with one of his greatest works, Don Giovanni.

Mozart and Prague

Mozart had a special relationship with Prague and the people of Prague. The audience here celebrated their Figaro with the much deserved reverence he was missing in his hometown Vienna. His quote "My Czechs understand me" became very famous in the Czech lands. Many tourists follow his tracks in Prague and visit the Mozart Museum of the Villa Bertramka where they can enjoy a chamber concert. In Prague, Don Giovanni premiered on October 29, 1787 at the Theatre of the Estates. In the later years of his life, Prague provided Mozart many financial resources from commissions. German poet Eduard Mörike's well-known novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag ("Mozart's on the way to Prague") is a fantasy about the composer's trip to that city in order to present Don Giovanni (the story, however, relates episodes that happen along the way, not in Prague itself).

Final illness and death

Mozart's final illness and death are difficult scholarly topics, obscured by Romantic legends and replete with conflicting theories. Scholars disagree about the course of decline in Mozart's health—particularly at what point Mozart became aware of his impending death and whether this awareness influenced his final works. The Romantic view holds that Mozart declined gradually and that his outlook and compositions paralleled this decline. In opposition to this, some contemporary scholarship points out correspondence from Mozart's final year indicating that he was in good cheer, as well as evidence that Mozart's death was sudden and a shock to his family and friends. Mozart's grave remains unmarked. His monument is his music. The actual cause of Mozart's death is also a matter of conjecture. His death record listed "hitziges Frieselfieber" ("severe miliary fever"), a description that does not suffice to identify the cause as it would be diagnosed in modern medicine. Dozens of theories have been proposed, including trichinosis, mercury poisoning, and rheumatic fever. The contemporary practice of bleeding medical patients is also cited as a contributing cause. Mozart died around 1 a.m. on December 5, 1791 while he was working on his final composition, the Requiem. A younger composer, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, was engaged by Constanze to complete the Requiem. He was not the only composer asked to complete the Requiem but is associated with it over others due to his significant contribution. According to popular legend, Mozart was penniless and forgotten when he died, and was buried in a pauper's grave. In fact, though he was no longer as fashionable in Vienna as before, he continued to have a well-paid job at court and receive substantial commissions from more distant parts of Europe, Prague in particular. Many of his begging letters survive but they are evidence not so much of poverty as of his habit of spending more than he earned. He was not buried in a "mass grave" but in a regular communal grave according to the 1783 laws. Though the original grave on St. Marx cemetery was lost, memorial gravestones have been placed there and on Zentralfriedhof. In 1809, Constanze married Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen (1761–1826). Being a fanatical admirer of Mozart, he edited vulgar passages out of many of the composer's letters and wrote a Mozart biography.

Works, musical style, and innovations

Mozart, along with Haydn and Beethoven, was a central representative of the classical style. His works spanned the period during which that style transformed from a predominantly simple musical language, as exemplified by the stile galant of his contemporaries such as Sammartini and Johann Stamitz, to a mature style which began to incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque, complexities against which the galant style was a reaction. Mozart's own stylistic development closely paralleled the maturing of the classical style as a whole. In addition, he was a prolific composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintets, and the keyboard sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. Mozart also wrote a great deal of religious music including masses. He also composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment. The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart's music. Clarity, balance, transparency, and uncomplicated harmonic language are his hallmark, although in his later works he explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. Mozart is commonly named along with Schubert as having a gift for pure, simple, and memorable melody, and to many listeners this is his most definitive characteristic. From his earliest life Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he travelled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language. When he went to London as a child, he met JC Bach and heard his music; when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra; when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and the opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other chords, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are essentially Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are "homotonal" (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the tonic minor). Others mimic the works of JC Bach, and others show the simple, rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna. As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of the abandoned Baroque styles into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201, uses a frankly contrapuntal main theme; in addition, in it he began to experiment with irregular phrase lengths, something a galant composer such as Sammartini would never have done. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had just published his opus 20 set; the influence of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers of the time. In Mozarts's hands sonata form transformed from the binary models of the baroque into the fully mature form of his later works, with a multiple-theme exposition, extended, chromatic and contrapuntal development, recapitulation of all themes in the tonic key, and coda. Throughout his life Mozart switched his focus from writing instrumental music to writing operas, and back again. He wrote operas in each style current in Europe: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo or Don Giovanni; and Singspiel, of which Die Zauberflöte is probably the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas, he developed the use of subtle and slight changes of instrumentation, orchestration, and tone colour to express or highlight psychological or emotional states and dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted upon one another. The increasing sophistication of his use of the orchestra in his symphonies and concerti served as a resource in his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas reacted back upon his purely instrumental composition.

Influence

Many important composers since Mozart's time have worshipped or at least been in awe of Mozart. Rossini averred, "He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge." Beethoven told his pupil Ries that he (Beethoven) would never be able to think of a melody as great as a certain one in the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24. Beethoven also paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on several of his themes: for example, the two sets of variations for cello and piano on themes from Mozart's Magic Flute, and cadenzas to several of Mozart's piano concertos, most notably the Piano Concerto No. 20, K466 (see below for this system and an explanation). After the only meeting between the two composers, Mozart noted that Beethoven would "give the world something to talk about." As well, Tchaikovsky wrote his Mozartiana in praise of him; and Mahler died with the name "Mozart" on his lips. The variations theme of the opening movement of the A major piano sonata (K331) was used by Max Reger for his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, written in 1914 and among his best-known works in turn.

The Köchel catalogue

In the decades after Mozart's death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel succeeded in this enterprise. Many of his famous works are referred to by their Köchel catalogue number; for example, the Piano Concerto in A major is often referred to simply as "K488" or "KV488". The catalogue has undergone six revisions.

Myths and controversies

Mozart is unusual among composers for being the subject of an abundance of legend, much due to the problem that none of his early biographers knew him personally. They often resorted to fiction in order to produce a work. Many myths began soon after Mozart died, but few have any basis in fact. An example is the story that Mozart composed his Requiem with the belief it was for himself. Sorting out fabrications from real events is a vexing and continuous task for Mozart scholars mainly because of the prevalence of legend in scholarship. Dramatists and screenwriters, free from responsibilities of scholarship, have found excellent material among these legends. An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and, in some versions, the tale that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart's death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart et Salieri, and Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. The last of these has been made into a feature-length film of the same name, which won eight Oscars. Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated. According to an essay by A. Peter Brown, "the Mozart mania of the 1980s was initiated by Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. It and the subsequent film directed by Milos Forman did more for Mozart's case than anything else in the two hundred years since the composer's death." Unfortunately, the same could be said of the popular myths surrounding Mozart, many of which are firmly rooted in the film. However, Shaffer and Forman have never claimed that Amadeus was based in fact, as pointed out by Shaffer himself- "From the start we agreed on one thing: we were not making an objective Life of Wolfgang Mozart. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film is even less of one." Shaffer and Forman have often emphasised the fictitious elements of the movie, although they are equally quick to defend elements of the film which they believe are accurate but are disputed by Mozart historians. Shaffer has detailed in many interviews, including one featured as an extra on the DVD release of the film, how the dramatic narrative was inspired by the biblical story of Cain and Abel - one loved by God, and one scorned. Transcribed as creative rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, the notion of divine blessing and murderous jealousy provides the basic premise for Amadeus, although there is no historical evidence of any rivalry between the two composers. Conversely, it is well documented that Salieri frequently loaned Mozart musical scores from the court library, and Mozart selected Salieri to teach his son, Franz Xaver. One of the more detailed essays on the "dramatic licenses" present in Amadeus is written by Gregory Allen Robbins, titled "Mozart & Salieri, Cain & Abel: A Cinematic Transformation of Genesis 4". Another area of debate involves Mozart's prodigy as a composer from childhood until his death. While he was composing from the age of five, some musicologists have criticised many of his earlier works as being simplistic or forgettable; other critics revere Mozart for his works from even his teenage years. On the other hand, the claim by the film Amadeus that Mozart would finish most works in his head and write them down uncorrected in only one draft, as if by divine inspiration, is generally believed to be an exaggeration. Quite the contrary, Mozart was a studiously hard worker, and by his own admission his extensive knowledge and intellect about music developed out of many years' close study of the European musical tradition. It was indicated in a letter to his father that he could write a piece finished in his head on paper while composing another at the same time.

Media

See also


- :Category:Compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Mozartkugel, a confectionary named in his honor.
- Mozart effect, a disputed theory that certain kinds of music enhance performance on certain mental tasks; the researchers who coined the term used a piece by Mozart in their first study.
- Rock Me Amadeus, a 1986 song by Falco, based on Shaffer's film

Further reading


- Braunbehrens, Volkmar: Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791, Timothy Bell Trans, HarperPerennial, 1986 ISBN 0-06-0997405-2
- Deutsch, Otto Erich: Mozart: A Documentary Biography, Eric Blom et al. Trans, Stanford University Press, 1965
- Aloys Greither: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1962
- Robert W. Gutman: Mozart: A Cultural Biography, Random, 2001 ISBN 015100482X
- H. C. Robbins Landon: 1791: Mozart's Last Year, Thames & Hudson, 1988 ISBN 0500281076
- Massimo Mila: Lettura delle Nozze di Figaro, Einaudi, 1979 ISBN 8806189379
- Stanley Sadie, ed.: Mozart and his Operas, St. Martin's, 2000 ISBN 031224410X
- Maynard Solomon: Mozart: a life, Harper, 1996 ISBN 0060926929
- Hershel Jick: A Listener's Guide to Mozart's Music, Vantage, 1997 ISBN 0553123089
- Marcia Davenport: Mozart, The Chautauqua Press, 1932
- Wilhelm Otto Deutsch, Mozart und die Religion (2005), [http://www.w-o-deutsch.de/mozart]
- Nicholas Till: Mozart and the Enlightenment,Faber,Norton, 1992 ISBN 0571161693
- Gregory Allen Robbins, "Mozart & Salieri, Cain & Abel: A Cinematic Transformation of Genesis 4", [http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/robbins.htm]
- The Mozart Project, [http://www.mozartproject.org/]

External links


-
- [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ gallica.bnf.fr], picture of [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?O=07721746 Mozart], his [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?O=07721742 mother], his [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?O=07721745 father], his [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?O=07721743 wife], and his [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/ConsultationTout.exe?O=07721744 familly] (bnf = French National Library).
- [http://www.wamozartfan.com WAMozartFan.com] The Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Educational Fanpage - resource for students, teachers and music lovers.
- [http://www.carolinaclassical.com/articles/mozart.html The Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]
- [http://www.visit-salzburg.net/ Historic information on Salzburg and Mozart's birth and living place]
- [http://web.telia.com/~u57013916/Edlinger%20Mozart.htm "The last (and best) portrait of Mozart"], a biometrical statistical confirmation that the recently identified painting by Edlinger from ca 1790 indeed shows Mozart
- [http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/MIT_Music/Mozart/ Free recordings of Vesperae de Dominica by the MIT choir]
- [http://www.angelfire.com/tn3/papazacharias/mozart.html Mozart's Piano sonatas (midi)]
- [http://www.centrebouddhisteparis.org/En_Anglais/Sangharakshita_en_anglais/Mozart_and_pauses/mozart_and_pauses.html Mozart and pauses]
- [http://www.mozartproject.org The Mozart Project] – the life, times and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- [http://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/make-table.cgi?Composer=MozartWA&preview=1 Mozart's Scores by Mutopia Project]
- [http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/mozart.html Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, from Classical Music Pages]
- [http://members.aon.at/michaelorenz/jenamy The "Jenamy Concerto"] The proper name of Mozart's piano concerto K. 271 revealed
- [http://www.pianopublicdomain.com/library/Mozart/ Free Mozart piano sheet music in PDF format.]
- [http://www.mozartforum.com Mozart Forum] Exploring the world of Classical-Era Music (1770-1827), encompassing the music, personalities and accomplishments of Mozart and his contemporaries.
- [http://www.mozart-archiv.de/ Mozart Archive]
- [http://reverent.org/mozart_or_salieri.html Can you tell Mozart from Salieri?]A quiz.
- [http://www.w-o-deutsch.de/mozart], Wilhelm Otto Deutsch, Mozart und die Religion (2005)
- [http://www.pianosociety.com/index.php?id=28 Mozart at Piano Society] - Biography and various free recordings in MP3 format. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ko:볼프강 아마데우스 모차르트 ms:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ja:ヴォルフガング・アマデウス・モーツァルト simple:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart th:โวล์ฟกัง อะมาเดอุส โมซาร์ท

1756

1756 was a leap year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar).

Events


- March 17 - St. Patrick's Day is celebrated in New York City for the first time (at the Crown and Thistle Tavern).
- April 12 - The French invade Minorca, then under British control.
- May 17 - The Seven Years' War formally begins when England declares war on France.
- May 20 - Battle of Minorca. The English fleet under John Byng is defeated by the French under Augustin de la Gallisonnière.
- May 28 - The British garrison in Minorca surrenders to the French.
- August 29 - Frederick the Great invades Saxony, beginning the war on the continent.
- October 1 - Battle of Lobositz. Frederick defeats an Austrian army under Marshal Maximilian von Browne.
- Frederick II of Prussia forces his country's peasants to grow the unpopular and obscure potato

Ongoing events


- French and Indian War (1754-1763)

Births


- January 27 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (d. 1791)
- February 6 - Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States (d. 1836)
- March 3 - William Godwin, English writer (d. 1836)
- May 27 - Maximilian I of Bavaria (d. 1825)
- June 6 - John Trumbull, American painter (d. 1843)
- June 20 - Joseph Martin Kraus, German-Swedish composer (d. 1792)
- August 1 - Pierre Louis Prieur, French politician (d. 1827)
- August 29 - Heinrich Graf von Bellegarde, Austrian field marshal and statesman (d. 1845)
- September 7 - Willem Bilderdijk, Dutch author (d. 1831)
- November 3 - Pierre Laromiguière, French philosopher (d. 1837)
- Abdullah bin Sabah, Kuwaiti ruler (d. 1814)
- Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm, Swedish statesman (d. 1813)

Deaths


- February 25 - Eliza Haywood, English actress and writer (b. 1693)
- April 10 - Giacomo Antonio Perti, Italian composer (b. 1661)
- April 18 - Jacques Cassini, French astronomer (b. 1677)
- July 24 - George Vertue, English engraver and antiquary (b. 1684)
- December 8 - William Stanhope, 1st Earl of Harrington, English statesman and diplomat
- Bernard Accama, Dutch painter (b. 1697) Category:1756 ko:1756년 simple:1756

December 5

December 5 is the 339th day (340th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 26 days remaining.

Events


- 1484 - Pope Innocent VIII issues the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the severest witchhunts in European history.
- 1492 - Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to set foot on the island of Hispaniola.
- 1560 - Francis II of France dies and is succeeded by Charles IX of France.
- 1590 - Niccolò Sfondrati becomes Pope Gregory XIV.
- 1766 - In London, James Christie holds his first sale.
- 1776 - At the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Phi Beta Kappa is founded as the first scholastic fraternity in the United States.
- 1831 - Former US President John Quincy Adams takes his seat in the House of Representatives.
- 1848 - California gold rush: In a message before the U.S. Congress, US President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.
- 1892 - Sir John Thompson becomes the fourth Prime Minister of Canada.
- 1926 - Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is premiered.
- 1932 - German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
- 1933 - Prohibition ends: Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had outlawed alcohol in the United States).
- 1934 - Abyssinia Crisis: Italian troops attack Wal Wal in Abyssinia, taking four days to capture the city.
- 1936 - The Soviet Union adopts a new constitution and the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic is established as a full Union Republic of the USSR.
- 1941 - In Battle of Moscow Zhukov launched a massive Soviet counter-attack against the German army, with the biggest offensive launched against Army Group Centre.
- 1941 - John Steinbeck's book Sea of Cortez is published (Steinbeck used knowledge gained writing this book to develop the marine biologist character Doc in Cannery Row).
- 1945 - Flight 19, a squadron of five U.S. Navy TBF Avenger bombers on a training flight out of Fort Lauderdale, is lost in the Bermuda Triangle.
- 1952 - The Abbott and Costello Show, starring comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, debuts on American television.
- 1955 - The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge and form the AFL-CIO.
- 1958 - Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) is inaugurated in the UK by Queen Elizabeth II when she speaks to the Lord Provost in a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.
- 1964 - Vietnam War: For his heroism in battle earlier in the year, Captain Roger Donlon of Saugerties, New York is awarded the first Medal of Honor of the war.
- 1974 - Party Political Broadcast, the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, is broadcast on BBC 2.
- 1976 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Pakistan resolution on security of non-Nuclear States.
- 1977 - Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya, Algeria, Iraq and South Yemen. The move is in retaliation to the Declaration of Tripoli against Egypt.
- 1978 - The Soviet Union signs a 'friendship treaty' with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
- 1979 - Sonia Johnson is formally excommunicated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for her outspoken criticism of the church concerning the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
- 1992 - Kent Conrad of North Dakota resigns his seat in the United States Senate and is sworn into the other seat from North Dakota, becoming the only US Senator ever to have held two seats on the same day.
- 2004 - BJP dissidents in the Indian state of West Bengal launch the Dr. Syamaprasad Jana Jagaran Manch forum.
- 2005 - The 2005 Southeast Asian Games end in Manila.
- 2005 - The Lake Tanganyika earthquake causes significant damage, mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Births


- 1377 - Jianwen Emperor of China (d. 1402)
- 1443 - Pope Julius II (d. 1513)
- 1495 - Nicolas Cleynaerts, Flemish grammarian (d. 1542)
- 1537 - Ashikaga Yoshiaki, Japanese shogun (d. 1597)
- 1539 - Fausto Paolo Sozzini, Italian theologian (d. 1604)
- 1547 - Ubbo Emmius, Dutch historian and geographer (d. 1625)
- 1595 - Henry Lawes, English composer (d. 1662)
- 1661 - Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, English statesman (d. 1724)
- 1687 - Francesco Geminiani, Italian violinist and composer (d. 1762)
- 1782 - Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the United States (d. 1862)
- 1803 - Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, Russian lyric poet (d. 1873)
- 1820 - Afanasy Fet, Russian poet (d. 1892)
- 1822 - Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, American president of Radcliffe College (d. 1907)
- 1830 - Christina Rossetti, British poet (d. 1894)
- 1839 - George Armstrong Custer, American general (d. 1876)
- 1841 - Marcus Daly, American mining tycoon (d. 1900)
- 1850 - Alexander Girardi, Austrian actor (d. 1918)
- 1855 - Clinton Hart Merriam, American ornithologist (d. 1942)
- 1859 - John Jellicoe, British Royal Navy admiral (d. 1935)
- 1867 - Józef Piłsudski, Polish revolutionary and statesman (d. 1935)
- 1868 - Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist (d. 1951)
- 1869 - Ellis Parker Butler, American author (d. 1937)
- 1870 - Vítězslav Novák, Czech composer (d. 1949)
- 1871 - Bill Pickett, American rodeo performer (d. 1932)
- 1872 - Harry Nelson Pillsbury, American chess player (d. 1906)
- 1875 - Sir Arthur Currie, Canadian soldier (d. 1933)
- 1879 - Clyde Cessna, American airplane manufacturer (d. 1954)
- 1886 - Rose Wilder Lane, American writer and reporter (d. 1968)
- 1890 - David Bomberg, British painter (d. 1957)
- 1890 - Fritz Lang, Austrian-born American film director (d. 1976)
- 1896 - Carl Ferdinand Cori, Austria-Hungarian-born American biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1984)
- 1898 - Grace Moore, American soprano (d. 1947{

Composer

A composer is a person who writes music. The term refers particularly to someone who writes music in some type of musical notation, thus allowing others to perform the music. This distinguishes the composer from a musician who improvises. However, a person may be called a composer without creating music in documentary form, since not all musical genres rely on written notation. In this context, the composer is the originator of the music, and usually its first performer. Later performers then repeat the musical composition they have heard. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians also varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music. For example, in the development of classical music in Europe, the function of composing music initially had no greater importance than the function of performing music. The preservation of individual compositions received little attention, and musicians generally had no qualms about modifying compositions for performance. Over time, however, the written notation of the composer has come to be treated as strict instructions, from which performers should not deviate without good reason. This notion is often seen as a purist one. The term "composer" is often used specifically to mean a composer in the Western tradition of classical music. In popular and folk music, the composer is typically called a songwriter (since the music generally takes the form of a song.)

Lists of composers


- List of composers
- List of opera composers
- List of uncategorized composers
- List of soundtrack composers

By style, time period, or technique


- List of classical music composers
- List of 20th century classical composers
- List of 21st century classical composers
- List of modernist composers

By nationality, culture, or identity


- List of French composers
- List of Dutch and Flemish composers
- List of Indonesian composers
- List of Italian composers
- List of Russian composers
- List of Polish composers
- List of Indian composers
- List of female composers
- List of gay, lesbian or bisexual composers
- List of composers of African descent

By chronology


- [http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/EasyTimeline/Introduction.htm Timeline of classical composers] Category:Classical music Composers Category:Occupations in music ko:작곡가 ja:作曲家 th:คีตกวี

European classical music

:This article is about the genre of classical music or art music in the Western musical tradition. For articles on classical music of non-Western cultures, see: Classical music, For the period of music in the late 18th century see Classical music era, Classical music is a broad, somewhat imprecise term, referring to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of, European art, ecclesiastical and concert music, encompassing a broad period from roughly 1000 to the present day. The central norms of this tradition, according to one school of thought, developed between 1550 and 1825, focusing on what is known as the common practice period.

Timeline

According to one school of thought, musical works are best understood in the context of their place in musical history; for adherents to this approach, this is essential to full enjoyment of these works. There is a widely accepted system of dividing the history of classical music composition into stylistic periods. According to this system, the major time divisions are:
- Medieval, generally before 1450. Chant, also called plainsong or Gregorian Chant, was the dominant form until about 1100.
- Renaissance, about 1450–1600, characterized by greater use of instrumentation, multiple melodic lines and by the use of the first bass instruments.
- Baroque, about 1600–1750, characterized by the use of complex counterpoint and growing popularity of keyboard music (harpsichord and pipe organ, since pianos didn't exist until the early 1700s, and didn't become popular until the classical music era) and orchestral music (it must be noted that orchestras, by that time, were of a much smaller constituition- see Chamber Music).
- Classical, about 1730–1820, an important era which established many of the norms of composition, presentation and style. Also, the classical era is marked by the disappearance of the harpsichord in favour of the piano, which from then on would become the central source for keyboard performance and composition.
- Romantic, 1815–1910 a period which codified practice, expanded the role of music in cultural life and created institutions for the teaching, performance and preservation of works of music.
- Modern, 1905–1975 a period which represented a crisis in the values of classical music and its role within intellectual life, and the extension of theory and technique. Some theorists, such as Arnold Schoenberg in his essay "Brahms the Progressive," insist that Modernism represents a logical progression from 19th century trends in composition; others hold the opposing point of view, that Modernism represents the rejection or negation of the method of Classical composition.
- 20th century, usually used to describe the wide variety of post-Romantic styles composed through 2000, which includes late Romantic, Modern and Post-Modern styles of composition.
- The term contemporary music is sometimes used to describe music composed in the late 20th century through present day
- The prefix neo is usually used to describe a 20th Century or Contemporary composition written in the style of an earlier period, such as classical, romantic, or modern. So for example, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony is considered a Neo-Classical composition. The dates are generalizations, since the periods overlapped. Some authorities subdivide the periods further by date or style. However, it should be noted that these categories are to an extent arbitrary; the use of counterpoint and fugue, which is considered characteristic of the Baroque era, was continued by Mozart, who is generally classified as typical of the Classical period, by Beethoven who is often described as straddling the Classical and Romantic periods, and Brahms, who is often classified as Romantic. This chart shows a selection of the most famous classical composers. For a more complete overview see Graphical timeline for classical composers

Classical music as "music of the classical era"

Main article: Classical music era In music history, a different meaning of the term classical music is occasionally used: it designates music from a period in musical history covering approximately Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to Beethoven – roughly, 1730–1820. When used in this sense, the initial C of Classical music is sometimes capitalized to avoid confusion.

The nature of classical music

Classical music is primarily a written musical tradition, preserved in music notation, as opposed to being transmitted orally, by rote, or in recordings. While differences between particular performances of a classical work are recognized, a work of classical music is generally held to transcend any particular performance of it. Works that are centuries old often are performed far more often than works recently composed. The use of notation is an effective vehicle for transmitting classical music because all active participants in the classical music tradition are able to read music and are schooled in both historical and contemporary performance practices. Normally, this ability comes from formal training, which usually begins with learning to play an instrument, and sometimes continues with instruction in music theory and composition. However, there are many passive participants in classical music who enjoy it without being able to read it or perform it. Classical music is meant to be experienced for its own sake. It is unlike other forms of music that serve merely as an adjunct to other forms of entertainment. Performances of classical music often take place in a relatively solemn atmosphere, with the audience expected to maintain silence and remain immobile during the performance, so that everyone can hear each note and nuance. The performers usually dress formally, a practice which is often taken as a gesture of respect for the music, and performers normally do not engage in casual banter or other direct involvement with the audience. Amateur private readings of chamber music are more informal home occasions. Written transmission, along with the veneration bestowed on classical works, has important implications for the performance of classical music. To a fair degree, performers are expected to perform a work in a way that realizes the original intentions of the composer, which during the 19th century became stated ever more explicitly (down to the level of small, note-by-note details) in the score. Indeed, deviations from the composer's intentions are sometimes condemned as outright ethical lapses. Yet the opposite trend--admiration of performers for new "interpretations" of the composer's work, can be seen, and it is not unknown for a composer to praise a performer for achieving a better realization of the composer's original intent than the composer was able to imagine. Thus, classical music performers often achieve very high reputations for their musicianship, even if they do not compose themselves. Classical composition often aspires to a very complex relationship between the affective (emotional) content of the music, and the idea content. There is, in the most esteemed works of Classical music, an intensive use of Musical development, the process by which a musical germ idea or motif is repeated in different contexts, or in altered form, so that the mind of the listener consciously or unconsciously compares the different versions. The classical genres of sonata form and fugue employ particularly rigorous forms of musical development. (See also History of sonata form) Another consequence of the primacy of the composer's written score is that improvisation plays a relatively minor role in classical music--in sharp contrast to traditions like jazz, where improvisation is central. Improvisation in classical music performance was far more common during the Baroque era, and recently the performance of such music by modern classical musicians has been enriched by a revival of the old improvisational practices. During the Classical period, Mozart and Beethoven sometimes improvised the cadenzas to their piano concertos--but tended to write out the cadenzas when other soloists were to perform them. Art music, concert music, and orchestral music are terms sometimes used as synonyms of classical music.

Complexity

Classical works are generally considered to display great musical complexity through heavy use of development, modulation (changing of keys), little outright repetition, a wide use of musical phrases that are not default length--that is, four or eight bars long- counterpoint, polyphony and sophisticated harmony. Also, in classical music very long works (30 minutes to three hours) may be built up hierarchically from smaller units (phrases, periods, sections, and movements). Structural levels are distinguished by Schenkerian analysis.

Emotional content

As with many fine art forms, classical music often aspires to communicate a quality of emotion which has a transcendent quality, expressing universals of the human condition. They argue that this deeper reserve of expression allows classical music to reach what has been called the "sublime" in art. Examples often cited in this argument are religious works such as the Masses of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Dvořák, or in works such as Beethoven's setting of Friedrich Schiller's poem, Ode to Joy, in the 9th symphony, which has often been used as a celebratory work at moments of national liberation or celebration, as in the Japanese practice of performing it to observe the New Year.

Instruments

Classical and popular music are distinguished to some extent by their choice of instruments. For the most part, the instruments used in common practice classical music are non-electrical and were invented prior to the mid-19th century (often, much earlier), and codified in the 18th and 19th centuries. They consist of the instruments found in an orchestra, together with a few other solo instruments (such as the piano, harpsichord, organ). The electric guitar plays an extremely prominent role in popular music, but naturally plays no role in classical music, and only appears occasionally in the classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Both classical and popular musicians have experimented for the last several decades with electrical or electronic instruments (for instance, the synthesizer or electronic tape), and instruments from other cultures (such as the gamelan). It must be noted that all the bass instruments didn't exist until the Renaissance (in Medieval Music, instruments are divided in two categories: outdoor/church, which sound loud, and indoor instruments). Also, many instruments which are associated today with popular music used to have important roles on early classical music, such as bagpipes, vilhuelas, hurdy-gurdys and some woodwind instruments. On the other hand, the acoustic guitar, for example, which used to be associated with popular music, started to gain proeminence on classical music since the 19th century, what culminated in the 20th century, and today has a prestige it never had before. Finally, it is important to know that the manners that a classical instrument is tuned may vary drastically according to the period from which the instrument is typical and the period in which the piece was composed. See musical tuning.

Permanence

One criterion that might be said to distinguish classical music is staying power. For instance, some of the works of J. S. Bach are now almost 300 years old, yet they continue to be widely performed. In contrast, big band music, for instance, a popular music genre of several decades ago, seems to be proving ephemeral in comparison. Bach had many contemporaries whose music was mediocre at best, and today their music is forgotten, surviving perhaps in libraries. The repertoire of classical music is skewed toward works recognized as excellent by listeners over long periods of time.

Influences between classical and popular music

Classical music has always been influenced or taken material from popular music. Examples include Erik Satie, Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, and postminimalism, as well as much postmodern classical music.

Classical music and folk music

Composers of classical music have often made use of folk music, that is, music created by untutored musicians, spread by word of mouth. Often, they have done so with an explicit nationalist ideology; in other cases they have simply mined folk music for thematic material. See: European Classical Composers Noted for Use of Folk Music

Classical music in education

Throughout history, parents have often made sure that their children receive classical music training from a young age. Early experience with music provides the basis for more serious study later. Some instruments, such as the violin, are almost impossible to learn to play at a professional level if not learned in childhood. Some parents pursue music lessons for their children for social reasons or in an effort to instill a useful sense of self-discipline; lessons have also been shown to increase academic performance. Some consider that a degree of knowledge of important works of classical music is part of a good general education. The 1990s marked the emergence in the United States of research papers and popular books on the so-called Mozart effect: a temporary, small elevation of a Mozart listener's scores on certain tests. The popularized version of the controversial theory was expressed succinctly by a New York Times music columnist: "researchers have determined that listening to Mozart actually makes you smarter." Promoters marketed CDs claimed to induce the effect. Florida passed a law requiring toddlers in state-run schools to listen to classical music every day, and in 1998 the governor of Georgia budgeted $105,000 a year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music. One of the original researchers commented "I don't think it can hurt. I'm all for exposing children to wonderful cultural experiences. But I do think the money could be better spent on music education programs." See also:
- Mozart effect
- Orff Schulwerk
- Suzuki method

Related genres


- Film music
- Electronic art music
- Indian classical music
- Video game music

Composers of classical music


- List of classical music composers

Terms of classical music

For terms relating specifically to the performance of classical music, see the Musical terminology.

Literature


- Norman Lebrecht, When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music, Simon & Schuster 1996

Sources


- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
- Becker, Judith (1969). "The Anatomy of a Mode", Ethnomusicology 13(2):267–279.

External links


- [http://www.classiccat.net/ Classic Cat] – A directory of free classical MP3.
- [http://www.classical.net/ Classical.net] – review, database and mailing-list resource
- [http://www.classicalarchives.com/ ClassicalArchives] – music, artists, composers, MIDI files
- [http://www.chopinmusic.net/forum ChopinMusic Forum] – a community of romantic music lovers
- [http://www.download-latest-online-music.com/free-classical-music-downloads.html European Classical Music] – chronology and free downloads
- [http://www.musicweb-international.com MusicWeb International] – CD reviews, composer articles, timelines, concert and book reviews
- [http://thegclef.blogspot.com The G Clef] All about Indian and European classical music. Also fine information on Classical Guitar and Recorder.
- [http://www.violinmp3.com/ ViolinMP3.com - Violin Information website, containing several classical music resources and composer guides] Classical music ko:서양 고전음악 ja:古典派音楽

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any "art music" that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part. The word "chamber" signifies that the music can be performed in a small room, often with an intimate atmosphere. However, it usually does not include, by definition, solo instrument performances.

Definition

The phrase chamber music suggests a piece for at least two instruments, but there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of instruments. In practice, chamber works for more than five instruments are unusual, and works scored for more than eight are rare. When dealing with a piece for ten or more players, it is generally considered a small chamber orchestra. Chamber works exist for many different combinations of instruments, with the string quartet often seen as the most important. Popular chamber groups other than the string quartet include the string trio, the piano trio, the piano quintet and the string quintet. Woodwind instruments and brass instruments are used less often. Several composers have written works for mixed groups of wind and strings, and some have written for wind instruments alone, but with the exception of the French horn, brass instruments are very rarely used. This is probably in part due to the fact that at the time chamber music was first being written, brass instruments did not have valves, and so could only produce a limited number of notes. While chamber music is frequently played in public concerts, it is usually heard in halls much smaller than those used for orchestral concerts. The more intimate acoustics of a smaller space, imitating the drawing rooms in which such music was originally played, are more suitable for a small group of instruments.

History

While the term is most often applied to instrumental performances, the madrigals of the Renaissance period in the 16th century may be considered chamber music. The most prominent Baroque form of this type is the trio sonata. In the Classical period, new forms were developed, most importantly the string quartet. These pieces were often written for amateurs, and not intended to be played in public. Many of the string quartets of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example, were written to be played for fun and in private, by a string quartet of which they were both members. One of the composers responsible for bringing chamber music to the concert hall is Ludwig van Beethoven. He wrote chamber music for amateurs, such as the Septet of 1800, but his last string quartets are very complex works which amateurs would have struggled to play. They are also seen as pushing the boundaries of acceptable harmony of that time, and are regarded as some of his most profound works. Following Beethoven in the romantic period, many other composers wrote pieces for professional chamber groups.

Resources

Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, edited by Walter Willson Cobbett in 1923, and updated and reprinted in 1963, is a comprehensive guide to chamber music compositions and composers up to that time. Sir Donald Francis Tovey, British pianist and musicologist, wrote many insightful essays on the subject of chamber music, some of them available in the volume of his Essays in Musical Analysis that he devotes to it.

Performance

Many classical musicians enjoy playing chamber music. In most cases, chamber music is performed without a conductor, so each performer has greater artistic freedom. For organizing a performance, the expense is lower and the logistics simpler than that for even a modest orchestra. While the repertoire is not suitable for beginners, there are pieces within the technical and artistic capabilities of most serious amateurs.

Ensembles

This is a partial list of the types of ensembles found in chamber music. The standard repertoire for chamber ensembles is rich, and the totality of chamber music in print in sheet music form is nearly boundless. See the articles on each instrument combination for examples of repertoire.

External links


- The [http://www.acmp.net Amateur Chamber Music Players] publishes a contact list of musicians worldwide who play chamber music for their own enjoyment. They also publish lists of repertoire.
- http://www.composerplanet.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?ChamberMusic
- [http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/instsearch.pl?inst=CHAMBER%2FSMALL Art of the States: Chamber/small] chamber music (3-8 instruments) by American composers
- [http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/instsearch.pl?inst=CHAMBER%2FLARGE Art of the States: Chamber/large] chamber music (9+ instruments) by American composers Category:Chamber music Category:Musical groups ja:重奏

Opera

's Opéra, Paris, opened 1875]] Opera refers to a dramatic art form, originating in Europe, in which the emotional content is conveyed to the audience as much through music, both vocal and instrumental as it is through the lyrics. From the beginning of the form about 1600, there has been contention whether the music is paramount, or the words, a theme that Richard Strauss took up in his final opera, Capriccio (1942). By contrast, in musical theater an actor's dramatic performance is primary, and the music plays a lesser role. Comparable art forms from various parts of the world are usually prefaced with an adjective indicating the region; examples include Chinese opera and Beijing opera. The drama is presented using the primary elements of theatre such as scenery, costumes, and acting. However, the words of the opera, or libretto, are sung rather than spoken. The singers are accompanied by a musical ensemble ranging from a small instrumental ensemble to a full symphonic orchestra. Besides words and music, opera draws from many other art forms. The visual arts, such as painting, are employed to create the visual spectacle on the stage, which is considered an important part of the performance, in the Baroque "English opera" or Restoration spectacular even the dominant aspect of it. Finally, dancing is often part of an opera performance, particularly in France. Singers and the roles they play are classified according to their vocal ranges. A particular singer's classifications change drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age. Male singers are classified as bass, bass-baritone, baritone, tenor and countertenor. Female singers are classified, as contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano. Each of these classifications has subcategories, such as lyric soprano, coloratura, soubrette, spinto, and dramatic soprano, which associate the singer's voice with the roles most suitable to the vocal timbre and quality and its range, or tessitura. The German Fach system is an especially organized system of classification. Traditional opera consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the dialogue and plot-driving passages often sung in a non-melodic style characteristic of opera, and aria, during which the movement of the plot often pauses, with the music becoming more melodic in character and the singer focusing on one or more topics or emotional affects. Short melodic or semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of what is otherwise recitative are also referred to as arioso; in the late 19th century, many composers abolished much of the distinction between recitative and aria, writing opera which is essentially presented in a restlessly melodic arioso style throughout. All types of singing in opera are accompanied by musical instruments, though until the late 18th century generally, and persisting until even later in some regions, recitative was accompanied by only the continuo group (harpsichord and 'cello or bassoon). During the period when composers often used both methods of recitative accompaniment in the same opera, the continuo-only practice was referred to as "secco" (dry) recitative, while orchestral-accompanied recitative was called "accompagnato" or "stromentato." Some genres of opera use spoken dialogue accompanied or unaccompanied by an orchestra rather than recitative. Such dialogue also is the essential feature of melodrama, in its original 19th century sense. Such melodrama grew partly from the practice that seems to have originated in the 16th century of writing incidental music to stage plays, either those already existing or newly composed. The most familiar example of such to most readers will probably be Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream; this work is almost certainly the most frequently performed of the genre in a context separate from its accompanying play, and has been transcribed for nearly all imaginable chamber combinations, as well as concert band. The pit orchestra underscoring the dramatic action in 19th century melodrama survives in today's tradition of film scores, and spectacular films incorporating serious music can be considered the direct heirs of melodrama. Perhaps such film scores can in some sense even be considered both the heirs and the competitors of grand opera.

History

Origins

The word opera means simply "works" in Latin, the plural of opus suggesting that it combines the arts of solo & choral singing, declamation, and dancing in a staged spectacle. The earliest work considered an opera in the currently used sense of the word dates from around 1597. It is Dafne, (now lost) written by Jacopo Peri largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the "Camerata". Significantly Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. In this case, members of the Camerata felt certain that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas had been originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. A later work by Peri, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day. Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing practise of performing polyphonic madrigals with one singer accompanied by an instrumental rendition of the other parts, as well as the rising popularity of more popular, more homophonic vocal genres such as the frottola and the villanella. In these latter two genres, the increasing tendency was toward a more homophonic texture, with the top part featuring an elaborate, active melody, and the lower ones (usually these was three-part compositions, as opposed to the four-or-more-part madrigal) a less active supporting structure. From this, it was only a small step to fully-fledged monody. All such works tended to set humanist poetry of a type that attempted to imitate Petrarch and his Trecento followers, another element of the period's tendency toward a desire for restoration of principles it associated with a mixed-up notion of antiquity. The solo madrigal, frottola, villanella and their kin featured prominently in semi-dramatic spectacles that were funded in the last seventy years of the 16th century by the opulent and increasingly secular courts of Italy's city-states. Such spectacles, called intermedi, were usually staged to commemorate significant state events; weddings, military victories, and the like, and alternated in performance with the acts of plays. Like the later opera, an intermedi featured the aforementioned solo singing, but also madrigals performed in their typical multi-voice texture, and dancing accompanied by the present instrumentalists. The intermedi tended not to tell a story as such, although they occasionally did, but nearly always focused on some particular element of human emotion or experience, expressed through mythological allegory. Another popular court entertainment at this time was the "madrigal drama," later also called "madrigal opera" by musicologists familiar with the later genre. This, as can probably be guessed, consisted of a series of madrigals strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative. In addition to opera in Italy, developing concurrently in the late 16th-early 17th centuries were the English masque and the French ballet au court, which were similar to the Italian intermedi in many respects. In both cases, the main difference apart from local musical style was a greater degree of audience (at this time, of course, the audience consisted only of invited nobles and courtiers) participation in the form of staged or processional dances. The English masque also featured a culminating "revel," in which the performers drifted into and cavorted with the audience. Opera was imported into both countries before the middle of the 17th century, where it fused with the local incipient genres. This led to the dominance of ballet in opera of the French tradition, while the thriving English tradition of incidental music, as well as the totalitarian Cromwell regime at mid-century, made it difficult for Italian-style opera to take hold there. In earlier times, music had been part of medieval mystery plays, with the composer of these best-known to modern audiences being Hildegard of Bingen. Whether these are to be regarded as possible progenitors of opera is highly debatable. At the time of their original performance, they were easily regarded as liturgical accretions. Such accretions to the generally prescribed system of chants were quite common, and the liturgical ceremony was itself dramatic to a degree, often featuring elaborate processions, to which the actions associated with liturgical drama may have been considered merely a minor addition. A new, 17th century form of religious drama, the oratorio did arise shortly after the advent of opera, though it owes at least as much to the (originally secular) non-dramatic recititive-aria form of the cantata.

Baroque opera

Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long; in 1637 the idea of a "season" (Carnival) of publicly-attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged in Venice. Influential 17th century composers of opera included Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi whose Orfeo (1607) is the earliest opera still performed today. Monteverdi's later Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) is also seen as a very important work of early opera. In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements, sponsored by Venice's Arcadian Academy (not a physical school, but rather a group of like-minded aristocrats and pedants), but which came to be associated with the poet Pietro Trapassi, called Metastasio, whose librettos helped crystallize so-called opera seria's moralizing tone. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa. Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many librettos had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an "opera-within-an-opera." One reason for this was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still less cultured than the nobility, to the public opera houses. These separate plots were almost immediately resurrected in a separately developing tradition that partly derived from the commedia dell'arte, (as indeed, such plots had always been) a long-flourishing improvisitory stage tradition of Italy. Just as intermedi had once been performed in-between the acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of "intermezzi", which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and '20s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria. They became so popular, however, that they were soon being offered as separate productions. Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like Handel found himself writing for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in the operas of Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century's close.

Bel canto and Italian nationalism

The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Literally "beautiful singing", bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control. Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco. Verdi's writing demanded vocal endurance and strength more than the agility required in bel canto; his works were also more demanding dramatically. Verdi's operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the nationalist movement (although his own politics were perhaps not quite so radical).

French opera

In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition, sung in the French, was founded by Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully arrived at court as a dancer and companion for young Louis XIV, that he might practice his Latin by conversing with a native speaker. Despite his foreign origin, he established an Academy of Music and monopolized French opera from 1672; this is rendered ironic by the later struggle for supremecy between the French and Italian operatic styles that raged in the former country's press for over a century. Lully's overtures, fluid and disciplined recitatives, danced interludes, divertissements and orchestral entr'actes between scenes, set a pattern that Gluck struggled to "reform" almost a century later. The text was as important as the music: royal propaganda was expressed in elaborate allegories, generally with affirmatory endings. Opera in France has continued to include ballet interludes and feature elaborate scenic machinery. Baroque French opera, elaborated by Rameau, (though Rameau was opposed by many French critics of his own day for altering any of Lully's practises; others, on the other hand, saw him as a champion of French sensibilities against the rising popularity of Italian opera in the country) was in some sense simplified by the reforms associated with Gluck (Alceste and Orfee) in the 1760s. Gluck composed arias and choruses that moved the plot forward, rather than being nearly irrelevant as had by this time become common. Choruses, indeed, were only just now coming back into opera of any style after a long hiatus. While the methods of Gluck were partially derived from those of the more progressive Italians (particularly in comic operas such as Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, which had been influential in France since its performance there in 1752), he also desired to strip opera from some Italian characteristics he considered superfluous and confusing. In this effort, he took many of his cues from such French tendencies as more syllabic text-setting, use of the chorus (which the French had at least kept tepidly alive while it had been almost completely dropped in Italy) and less adherence to the standard da capo aria form. Because Gluck combined Italian and French methods of undermining opera seria, his "reform" can be seen as a (to some degree conscious) uniting of those styles, his response to an ever-continuing controversy. Later in the century and early in the first half of the 18th, French opera was influenced by the bel canto of Rossini and other Italians (though sung in French). This international synthesis of styles leads directly into 19th century French "Grand Opera," the most sophisticated operatic genre of the 19th century until Wagner.

Other Comic Styles

French opera with spoken dialogue is referred to as opéra comique, irrespective of its subject matter. German opera of this type is called Singspiel. Depending on the weight of its subject matter, opera comique shades into operetta, which arose as a wildly popular form of entertainment in the second half of the 19th century. Along with the music-hall potpourri called vaudeville, this gave rise to the 20th century genre of musical comedy, perfected in New York and London between the wars.

Romantic opera and French grand opera

The synthesis of elements that is French grand opéra first appeared in Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829) and Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831). Grand opera is usually in five acts and includes dance interludes for complete ballet company. While this genre reached its apotheosis in Hector Berlioz's masterpiece Les Troyens, the most famous opera in the French grand opera tradition may be Gounod's Faust, particularly in the United States where it was a favorite at the Met for the better half of the 20th century. By mid-century, opera practically meant Grand Opera; the works of Verdi, supposedly a quintessential Italian composer, owe much to this genre, as do those of Wagner, who was both influenced and made acceptable by the sheer extravagance of scale involved in such productions. The similarly extravagant production, including ballet set pieces, of such Russian works as Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin can probably be traced back to the grand opera tradition as well.

German-language opera

Before the late 18th century, German-language opera was largely a copy of the Italian, although in early-century works of such composers as Reinhard Keiser, the German-speakers achieved a seriousness of tone and grandeur of scale rarely approached in Italy. The above-mentioned singspiel also flourished at this time, being descended from the school dramas with interpolated songs that the students in Lutheran church-schools often produced. Mozart's German Singspiel Die Zauberflöte (1791) stands at the head of a German opera tradition that was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven (who wrote only one, which actually stands more in the French Revolutionary "rescue opera" tradition of Balfe and Gretry), Heinrich Marschner, Weber (composer of the great Der Freischütz, containing elements of both singspiel and melodrama, and a major influence on several Romantic composers) and eventually Wagner. Before Wagner, there had been little all-sung German language opera of any account for several decades. Though very much inspired by the works of Weber, Wagner pioneered a through-composed style, in which recitative and aria blend into one another and are constantly accompanied by the orchestra; this results in a sort of endless melody, which is perpetuated by the avoidance of any clear cadence until moments of great articulation. Wagner also made copious use of the leitmotif (Weber had used a similar device earlier, and was hardly the first to do so; Wagner's, however, are a main building-block of his scores, rather than mere recurring motives), a dramatic device which associates a musical line with each character or idea in the story.

Other national operas

Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one in the 17th century, and another beginning in the mid-19th century. During the 18th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form. Just as it was in Spain, Italian opera was highly popular in Russia. In the 19th century, Russian composers also began to write important operas based on nationalist themes, national literature, and folk tales, beginning with Mikhail Glinka (e.g. Ruslan and Lyudmila) and followed by Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor), Modest Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Sadko), and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin). These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, in part as a function of the more general Slavophilism movement. Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century. Antonín Dvořák, most famous for Rusalka, wrote 13 operas; Bedřich Smetana wrote eight (The Bartered Bride being the most famous); and Leoš Janáček wrote ten, including Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Katyá Kabanová. The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was Ferenc Erkel, mostly dealing with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are Hunyadi László and Bánk bán.

After Wagner: verismo and modernism

Ferenc Erkel (1923).]] After Wagner, all opera for many decades laboured in his gigantic shadow. Nearly all composers felt they must react or respond to him in some way, and opera in the early 20th century took several paths. One fairly short-lived path was manifested in the sentimental "realistic" melodramas of verismo operas, a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci and such popular operas of Giacomo Puccini as La Boheme and Tosca. Another reaction to Wagner's mythic medievalizing can be seen in the psychological intensity and social commentary of Richard Strauss (e.g. Salome, Elektra). Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, opera has enjoyed tremendous appeal and has been performed around the world. Despite this, seemingly but a handful of modern operas have joined the standard repertory: Berg's Wozzeck, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, Glass's Einstein on the Beach and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites are among these.

Contemporary trends

Sociology of opera

All art forms have a social context, and opera likewise cannot exist in a vacuum. A string quartet exists in manuscript and printed score, and a truly musical person, playing one part, or seated at a keyboard, can hear the intent of the music, but the printed score for an opera must be realized in a production, even a slender one, for its impact. Thus there exists