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Chapter 9
Vocal Music
1650-1750
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
France: Comédie-ballet and Tragédie en musique
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
France: Comédie-ballet and Tragédie en musique
• Tragédie en musique consisted of:
• an overture
• an allegorical prologue
• five acts of entirely sung drama, each
divided into several scenes
• many divertissements (interludes)
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
France: Comédie-ballet and Tragédie en musique
•
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
• 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)
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
• 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)
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
•
Handel Guilio Cesare Act I, Scene 5-7
-
•
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
•
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
The castrato.
This early 18th-century caricature
lampoons two well-known tendencies
of castrati: to put on weight and to sing
fantastically elaborate passagework.
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
Italy: Opera seria
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera
• semi-operas flourished in the second half of
the 17th century
• essentially plays with a large proportion of
vocal and instrumental musical numbers
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera
• 17th century was time of political unrest in
England and circumstances were not
favorable to introduction of opera from
abroad
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera
• ballad opera - play with music that
portrayed common criminals rather than
mythological figures or historical heros
Sunday, October 21, 12
Opera
England: Masque, Semi-opera, Opera and Ballad Opera
• John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch
excerpts from The Beggar’s Opera
-
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12
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.
Sunday, October 21, 12
Sacred Music
Motet, Mass and Cantata
•
•
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sacred Music
Motet, Mass and Cantata
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
Johann Sebastian
Bach
Bach holds in his hand a copy of
his Canon Triplex, BWV 1076.
Sunday, October 21, 12
Sacred Music
Motet, Mass and Cantata
• 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
Sunday, October 21, 12
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
Sunday, October 21, 12