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"Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"
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Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte
Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.
eBook
Mozart in motion : his work and his world in pieces
Mozart holds a central, unwavering place in our culture, and his works are widely loved and listened to, often as much-loved favourites, or as background music. But how much do we really hear and understand the music that is played, and what can it reveal to us of the great composer? Mozart in Motion is a unique biography of Mozart's music, a journey through the pieces of his canon which leads us to the pleasures of the works and an understanding of why they move us so intensely, as well as into the major and lesser known moments of Mozart's life. One reason Mozart's works have remained so ubiquitous, Mackie argues, is that he was composing at precisely the moment when our modern world was forming, and his priorities, explorations and emphases speak to our contemporary world.
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Performing Operas for Mozart
The Italian opera company in Prague managed by Pasquale Bondini and Domenico Guardasoni played a central role in promoting Mozart's operas during the final years of his life. Using a wide range of primary sources which include the superb collections of eighteenth-century opera posters and concert programmes in Leipzig and the Indice de' teatrali spettacoli, an almanac of Italian singers and dancers, this study examines the annual schedules, recruitment networks, casting policies and repertoire selections of this important company. Woodfield shows how Italian-language performances of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito flourished along the well-known cultural axis linking Prague in Bohemia to Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony. The important part played by concert performances of operatic arias in the early reception of Mozart's works is also discussed and new information is presented about the reception of Josepha Duschek and Mozart in Leipzig.
eBook
Mozart's Chamber Music with Keyboard
Internationally renowned scholars and performers present a wide range of new analytical, historical and critical perspectives on some of Mozart's most popular chamber music: his sonatas with violin, keyboard trios and quartets and the quintet with wind instruments. The chapters trace a broad chronology, from the childhood works, to the Mannheim and Paris sonatas with keyboard and violin, and the mature compositions from his Vienna years. Drawing upon the most recent research, this study serves the reader, be they a performer, listener or scholar, with a collection of writings that demonstrate the composer's innovative developments to generic archetypes and which explore and assess Mozart's creative response to the opportunities afforded by new and diverse instrumental combinations. Manners of performance of this music far removed from our own are revealed, with concluding chapters considering historically informed practice and the challenges for modern performers and audiences.
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Mozart and Enlightenment semiotics
In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes movements from Mozart's symphonies, concertos, operas, and church music. He argues that Mozartian semiosis is best understood within the empiricist tradition of Condillac, Vico, Herder, or Adam Smith, which emphasized the constitutive role of signs within human cognition. Recognizing that the rationalist model of neoclassical rhetoric has guided much recent work on Mozart and his contemporaries, Rumph demonstrates how the dialogic tension between opposing paradigms enabled the composer to negotiate contradictions within Enlightenment thought.
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The Cambridge companion to the Magic Flute
\"Premiered in 1791, The Magic Flute remains Mozart's most-performed opera worldwide. This Companion covers historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches and reception history, and engages with current debates including the representation of gender, race and exoticism. It provides an essential framework for understanding the opera today\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Recognition in Mozart's operas
Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Recognition — or anagnôrisis, Aristotle's term in the Poetics — is a moment of new awareness that brings about a crucial reversal in the action. Employing both literary and musical analysis, and drawing on critical thought from Aristotle to Terence Cave, this book explores the ways in which the themes of Mozart's operas — clemency, constancy, forgiveness, and other ideals cherished by late 18th-century culture — depend for their dramatization on recognition. Several of the operas culminate in a moment of climactic recognition, many involve the use of disguise, and all include scenes in which characters make significant realizations of identity, feeling, or purpose. Many turn explicitly on themes of knowledge, themes that possess a special resonance in an age that named itself the Enlightenment. A critical understanding of recognition in Mozart's operas reveals the late 18th-century culture of sensibility as an influential but uneasy presence in the age of enlightenment. At the same time, it opens up new ways of thinking about questions of cultural identity, conventions of ending, and the representation of cultural values in these works. Theoretical chapters are devoted to the concepts of recognition and plot; analytical chapters are devoted to Die Zauberflöte, La finta giardiniera, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and La clemenza di Tito. Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, and other works of Mozart and his contemporaries are also considered.
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