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Well-known for leading audiences to a new appreciation of Verdi as a subtle and elaborate musical thinker, Pierluigi Petrobelli here turns his attention to the intriguing question of how musical theater works. In this collection of lively, penetrating essays, Petrobelli analyzes specific operas, mainly by Verdi, in terms of historical context, musical organization, and dramaturgical conventions. Originally published in 1995. ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.

Menchelli-Buttini revela así acertadamente la carencia más llamativa de las principales monografías dedicadas al tema: la biografía de Edward Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Works (edición de Frank Walker, Londres, Arnold 1960, primera edición de 1905), que, pese a sus limitaciones, sigue teniendo un extraordinario valor historiográfico; el estudio de Donald Grout, Alessandro Scarlatti: An Introduction to His Operas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979 (cuya trascendencia en el fallido proyecto de edición de las óperas completas hay que reconocer); y la tesis de Carl Reginald Morey, Tke Late Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti (Ann Arbor, UMI, 1974, pero defendida en la Indiana University en 1965). Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 33-60. Las últimas aportaciones de Norbert Dub owy centradas en la identificación de los hipotextos españoles y franceses de La Statira (\"La Statira\", una proposta di lettura, en Devozione e Passione: Alessandro Scarlatti nella Napoli cit., pp. 225-241), abrieron un camino prometedor que, por desgracia, no ha dado muchos frutos en la última década. Que 1696 pudo haber sido un momento de reflexión musical y cambio estilístico para el compositor lo sugieren no sólo la llegada al virreinato del duque de Medinaceli, sino también un importante documento publicado por Griffin según el cual, en la serenata II Genio di Partenope, Scarlatti «compuso todo diferentemente de su sólito» (Thomas Griffin, Alessandro Scarlatti's Serenata 'Genio di Partenope, Gloria del Sebeto, Piacere di Mergellina' and the Summer of 1696 at Naples, en Devozione e Passione: Alessandro Scarlatti nel 350° anniversario cit., pp. 425-458: 440). De hecho, algunos documentos demuestran el interés de Medinaceli эог las óperas de Pratolino, por ejemplo a correspondencia entre éste y el cardenal Francesco Maria de\" Medici (ver José María Domínguez Rodríguez, La música de Alessandro Scarlatti entre el duque de Medinaceli y el cardenal Francesco Maria de' Medici, en Devozione e Passione: Alessandro Scarlatti nella Napoli cit., pp. 45-66). Lucio Manlio Vituperioso (Stampiglia, Pratolino 1705), II gran Tamerlano (Salvi, ibidem 1706); Teodosio (quizás Vincenzo Grimani, Ñapóles, S. Bartolomeo, 1709: este cardenal y virrey, fallecido en 1710, en el libro se confunde por error con un imposible «Michele Grimani (1697-1775)», p. 12); los dramas a los que Scarlatti contribuyó parcialmente (como el Giunio Bruto cuyo tercer acto fue compuesto entre 1710 y 1711 para el emperador José I junto con el primero de Cario Francesco Cesarini y el segundo de Antonio Gaïdar a).

Steven Zohn (Temple University) gave the plenary lecture at the Saturday luncheon, and the conference was punctuated by several exquisite performances of baroque music, featuring the House of Time ensemble, Justin Bland on natural trumpet and the UNLV Concert Singers and Chamber Orchestra, together with members of staff, students and guests. Jessica Sternbach (Temple University) presented a view of musical practice via art history in her paper ‘Subtle Harmonies: Gerard ter Borch's Music Lessons’. The focus of this paper, however, was Telemann's interest in the education of women, and his references specifically to a literary journal, Die vernünfftigen Tadlerinnen – ostensibly written by women but actually penned by men using female pseudonyms – which promoted the agency of women as crucial for the establishment of a German national culture.

History of music has been made to consist of \"style periods\", \"schools\", \"influences\", \"reform\", of \"tradition\" and \"progress\", and in turn too little attention has been paid to the active parts played by individuals and groups who in fact make history. En ocasiones, con el fin de comprender en mayor profundi dad la escritura musical y su relación con la vocalidad del cantante, se hace referencia a los textos de los libretos o a las indicaciones escénicas. Las arias para Cecchi: análisis global Domenico Cecchi, conocido como \"il Cortona\" por ser ésta su ciudad natal, fue alumno de Placido Basili, maestro de capilla de la catedral cortonesa. Timms también indica que Cecchi habría actuado en esta ciudad entre 1681 y '84, lo que es compatible con lo propuesto por Gentile, quien menciona la participación del cantante en el carnaval veneciano de 1681 (pero sin aludir a la ópera de Sartorio).15 Asimismo, tanto Gentile como el Dizionario Enciclopedico Universale della Musica e dei Musicisti recogen que, en 1682, Cecchi trabajó al servicio del emperador Leopoldo I, para quien pudo desempeñar actividades diplomáticas, pasando unos meses después a hacerlo en la corte romana de Cristina de Suecia.16 Con esta diversidad de datos, no necesariamente contradictorios entre sí, parece evidente que son necesarias nuevas indagaciones para esclarecer este periodo de la biografía de Cecchi.17 En lo que sí hay coincidencia es en situar el cénit de la carrera de Cortona en la década de 1690 - cuando ya trabajaba para el duque de Mantua -, gracias a la sucesión de una serie de éxitos.18 Entre ellos, destacó el papel de Adone, uno de los roles principales de la suntuosa Il favore degli dei (Aurelio Aureli / Bernardo Sabadini), representada en Parma en 1690 con ocasión de la boda de Odoardo Farnese con Dorotea Sofía de Neoburgo; en esta ópera compartió escenario con cantantes de la talla de Siface o Pistocchi,

Regina Compton (Eastman School of Music) examined the relationship between stage directions and musical gestures in Handel's secco recitatives. Focusing on a variety of stage actions and character expressions (some based on convention and others specific to the dramatic context), she demonstrated Handel's remarkably insightful correlation between harmonic relationships, rhythmic gestures and on-stage action (including thwarted actions). Certain works appear to have been composed to suffice with one-to-a-part performance (or two-to-a-part for the uppermost and lowest parts), but Thompson showed that many other works were designed for multiple singers on each part and often contrast two different choirs - in some cases both choirs are nearly equal in size, while in other cases there is a petit choeur (with various configurations of single and multiple singers per part) that is contrasted with a grand choeur.

The \"Sonates pour le clavecin [...] Opera IV,\" published in 1751 by Boivin under the name of Domenico Scarlatti, have long been thought to represent a case of misattribution, as being not newly composed sonatas but rather transcriptions from opera arias. We have discovered, however, that the three printed sources of these sonatas differ remarkably in content. Only one of the three sources contains arrangements of opera arias by Francesco Mancini, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Nicola Francesco Haym; the two others consist of seven sonatas for harpsichord by Domenico Scarlatti. The latter represent an authentic collection of the sonatas \"Opera IV\" by Scarlatti, which comprise the first printed edition of the sonatas K. 112, 53, 140, 101, 68 and 106. [Publication abstract]

On 25 January 2015 the final concert of the Resonance Early Music Festival was performed before an enthusiastic audience in the Vienna Konzerthaus. As a fitting close to the series Alessandro Quarta conducted the Concerto Romano and five singers representing the four seasons and Jove in a stunning performance of Alessandro Scarlatti's 1716 serenata La Gloria di Primavera (‘Nato è già l’austricao sole’). First heard at Naples in celebration of the birth of the Habsburg Archduke Leopold, it was performed on the evening of 19 May 1716, in the palace of Don Nicola Gaetano d’Aragona according to the libretto printed by Michele-Luigi Muzio at Naples in 1716.

The procedure that I named in an earlier Early Music article ' dots for the band, not for the singer', and identified in the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti and Handel, is also to be found in their cantatas. It is found in the cantatas of other Neapolitan composers too, such as Mancini, Porpora and Leo, and in those of Bononcini. Surprisingly, this feature also occurs in the operas and cantatas of Rameau and in Montéclair's cantatas as well. In Rameau the diminutions are at the quaver level, however, though the Montéclair examples here have the usual semiquaver inequality of the Italians. ' Dots for the band' seems to die out with the advent of the Rococo style, at which point composers begin to write out their vocal divisions in full. Some movements by Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti begin with undotted diminutions and only later move into dotting. This indicates that the players must make an initial decision to play unequally. ' As rosy dawn' from Handel's Theodora is a case in point and actually shows the composer conveying expression through the controlled use of dotting. This is not adequately conveyed in Watkins Shaw's vocal score of the piece.

When Claudio Monteverdi was commissioned by Alessandro Striggio in December 1616 to set to music a theatrical text by Scipione Agnelli, Le nozze di Tetide, the composer made trenchant criticisms of it on the grounds of its problematic staging, its unmusical qualities and its failure to rise to the dramatic level of his operas Orfeo (1607) and Arianna (1608). This much is well known. However, we have failed to understand the place of Le nozze di Tetide in the context of a single evening's entertainment (a veglia) intended to mark the entrance into Mantua of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga's new bride, Caterina de' Medici (they were married in Florence in February 1617), and the circumstances that eventually led to it being dropped in favour of Santi Orlandi's Gli amori di Aci e Galatea (performed in Mantua on 13 March). The Tetide affair also reveals Monteverdi's use of high-level intermediariescum-brokers in his relations with Mantua, and his ongoing ties with the Gonzagas even after his dismissal from court service in the summer of 1612 and his subsequent move to St Mark's, Venice.