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Overture (from French ouverture, lit. "opening") is a music instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century. [1] During the early Romantic era, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn composed overtures which were independent, self-existing, instrumental, programmatic works that foreshadowed genres such as the symphonic poem.
The Italian overture is a piece of orchestral music which opened several operas, oratorios and other large-scale works in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. An Italian overture typically has a three- movement structure [ 1 ] – the outer movements are quick, the middle movement is slow.
The opera opens with a substantial overture which begins with a trumpet call (which in act 3 we learn is the war call of the Colonna family) and features the melody of Rienzi's prayer at the start of act 5, which became the opera's best-known aria. The overture ends with a military march.
Nabucco (Italian pronunciation:, short for Nabucodonosor [naˌbukoˈdɔːnozor,-donoˈzɔr]; English: "Nebuchadnezzar") is an Italian-language opera in four acts composed in 1841 by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera.
Armida (Italian pronunciation:) is an operatic dramma per musica by Antonio Salieri in three acts, set to a libretto by Marco Coltellini. The plot is based on the epic poem Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso. Lully, Handel and Traetta, to name but a few, had already composed operas based on the situations that Tasso originally developed.
In Italian opera after about 1800, the "overture" became known as the sinfonia. [55] Fisher also notes the term Sinfonia avanti l'opera (literally, the "symphony before the opera") was "an early term for a sinfonia used to begin an opera, that is, as an overture as opposed to one serving to begin a later section of the work". [55]
The Thieving Magpie is best known for the overture, which is musically notable for its use of snare drums. This memorable section in Rossini's overture evokes the image of the opera's main subject: a devilishly clever, thieving magpie. Rossini wrote quickly, and La gazza ladra was no exception. A 19th-century biography quotes him as saying that ...
The style of Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi is heard in full chorus scenes. [4] [6] One theme within the opera's overture references the works of composer Franz Liszt. One prelude in Act 2 uses Smetana's fondness of switching between the dominant seventh and the tonic. [4] Alfred does leave room for improvement. Dvořák followed Körner ...