Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Literally, "serious opera". Dominant style of opera in the 18th century, not only in Italy but throughout Europe (except France). Rigorously formal works using texts, mainly based on ancient history, by poet-librettists led by Metastasio. Patronized by the court and the nobility. Star singers were often castrati.
The history of opera has a relatively short duration within the context of the history of music in general: it appeared in 1597, when the first opera, Dafne, by Jacopo Peri, was created. Since then it has developed parallel to the various musical currents that have followed one another over time up to the present day, generally linked to the ...
Download as PDF; Printable version; ... Arne was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, ... A History of Opera. New York: W ...
The Italian word opera means "work", both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. The Italian word in turn derives from the Latin opera.Opera is also the Latin plural of opus, with the same root, but the word opera was a singular Latin noun in its own right, and according to Lewis and Short, in Latin "opus is used mostly of the mechanical activity of work, as that of animals ...
His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), was equally novel and began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Arne was one of the few English composers of ...
"The Standard Repertoire of Grand Opera 1607–1969", a list included in Norman Davies's Europe: a History (Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback edition Pimlico, 1997). ISBN 0-7126-6633-8. Operas appearing in the chronology by Mary Ann Smart in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (Oxford University Press, 1994). ISBN 0-19-816282-0.
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart.
Composers mentioned in the chronology by Mary Ann Smart in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (OUP, 1994) ISBN 0-19-816282-0. "A Bird's Eye View of the World's Chief Opera Composers" in The Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes (10th edition revised by John Owen Ward, 1970). ISBN 0-19-311306-6.