Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443867268
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Excelsior, an extraordinary spectacular ballet in 6 parts and 11 scenes by Luigi Manzotti, with music by Romualdo Marenco, was premiered on 11 January 1881 at La Scala Milan. This unique and remarkable allegorical work depicts the rise of human civilization, and the stormy progress of technical development. This scenario is envisioned as an embittered struggle between the Spirits of Light and Darkness, and their more human personifications as Civilization (or Progress) and Obscurantism. The invention of the steam ship, the iron bridge, electricity, telegraphy, the building of the Suez Canal and the Mont Cenis Tunnel see the Spirit of Darkness admitting defeat. A Grand Festival of the nations of the world in harmony is celebrated with an apotheosis of light and peace. The ballet enjoyed immense popularity and was constantly revived all over Europe. After its Vienna premiere in 1885, it remained in the repertory for 29 years, receiving 329 performances. Modern revivals have been by Ugo dell’Ara for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1967, at La Scala di Milano in 1974, the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in 1990, and at the Teatro Degli Arcimboldi Milano in 2002. Sport premiered at La Scala, Milan on 10 February 1897. This was the third and last of Manzotti’s grand positivist trilogy which started with, and found its apotheosis in, Excelsior. As modern and spectacular as the other two, Sport was intended as a celebration of every kind of athletic activity, especially in the enthusiastic aftermath of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens on 11 April 1896. Although the scenario concerned the eternal triangle, it was only an excuse for displays of skill by soloists and stupendous ensembles for the corps de ballet, whose costumes were very daring for that period. Sport has been seen as the ancestor of the precision manoeuvres of the Hoffmann Girls, and even as an influence on Fokine’s geometric groupings and on the styles of Golejzovsky, Nijinska, Balanchine and Lifar. The popularity of the work was enormous (46 performances in the first season), and was equally successful when revived in 1905 and 1906 under the direction of Achille Copini. Romualdo Marenco (1841–1907) was involved with music from an early age, and began his professional life as violinist and second bassoonist at the Teatro Andea Doria in Genoa. His career as a composer was also launched at this theatre with the music for the ballet Lo sbarco di Garibaldi a Marsala. For a while he became principal violinist in various orchestras before being appointed deputy concert leader and director of ballet music at La Scala Milan, a position he held for seven seasons. Marenco worked with dance masters like Ferdinando and Giovanni Pratesi. But most significantly it was during this period that he met the famous choreographer Luigi Manzotti. He began a musical collaboration with Manzotti that was to bring them both great fame. Luigi Manzotti (1835–1905) was very successful in Rome as a mime artist, and choreographed his first ballet in 1858 (Le Morte di Masaniello). Even in his early works his special gifts for spectacular effects became apparent, as in Cleopatra and Pietro Micca. He went to Milan in 1872, where he found his true metier in collaboration with Romualdo Marenco. Manzotti surpassed his Roman successes, first with Sieba, ossia La spada di Wodan (Turin 1878), but most famously with the positivist trilogy Excelsior (Milan 1881), Amor (Milan 1886) and Sport (Milan 1897). Manzotti was the master of the ballo grande which used historical and allegorical subjects treated with great seriousness for their deeper social and symbolic significance, and employing huge casts and elaborate mise en scène to create an overwhelming spectacle. His ballets were devised as a series of related episodes expressed in mime with simple but effectively devised large ensembles by dancers, and processions with trained supernumeraries. Marenco’s music has been dismissed as a medley of polkas and military band music, yet it was spread all over the world by the success of Excelsior: always carefully moulded to the choreographic action, it is well-written, with melodic verve, formal invention, and an overwhelming sense of rhythmic dynamism. The music is fast-moving and vivacious, rarely sentimental, and often induces a torrential sense of exhilaration. The enduring success of Excelsior, the only full-length Italian ballet to survive from the 19th century, is a tribute to Manzotti’s artistic vision and Marenco’s musical imagination.
Author: Dan Dietz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538168944
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 663
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Book Description
Broadway musicals of the 1900s saw the emergence of George M. Cohan and his quintessentially American musical comedies which featured contemporary American stories, ragtime-flavored songs, and a tongue-in-cheek approach to musical comedy conventions. But when the Austrian import The Merry Widow opened in 1907, waltz-driven operettas became all the rage. In The Complete Book of 1900s Broadway Musicals, Dan Dietz surveys every single book musical that opened during the decade. Each musical has its own entry which features the following: Plot summary Cast members Creative team Song lists Opening and closing dates Number of performances Critical commentary Film adaptations, recordings, and published scripts, when applicable Numerous appendixes include a chronology of book musicals by season; chronology of revues; chronology of revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; a selected discography; filmography; published scripts; Black musicals; long and short runs; and musicals based on comic strips. The most comprehensive reference work on Broadway musicals of the 1900s, this book is an invaluable and significant resource for all scholars, historians, and fans of Broadway musicals.
Author: David Trippett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107111250
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 399
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Book Description
Explores the rich and varied interactions between nineteenth-century science and the world of opera for the first time.
Author: New York Public Library. Reference Department
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 756
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Author: San Francisco Free Public Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classified catalogs (Dewey decimal)
Languages : en
Pages : 606
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Author: Francesca Vella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification. Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Union catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 712
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Author: Frederick Herman Martens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballet
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Author: Lorenzo Bianconi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226045919
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of expert scholars has worked together to investigate the Italian operatic tradition in its entirety, rather than limiting its focus to individual eras or major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon-resulting in the sort of panoramic view critical to a deep and fruitful understanding of the art. Opera on Stage, the second book of this multi-volume work to be published in English-in an expanded and updated version-focuses on staging and viewing Italian opera, from the court spectacles of the late sixteenth century to modern-day commercial productions. Mercedes Viale Ferrero describes the history of theater and stage design, detailing the evolution of the art well into the twentieth century. Gerardo Guccini does the same for stage and opera direction and the development of the director's role as an autonomous creative force. Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell discusses the interrelationships between theatrical ballet and Italian opera, from the age of Venetian opera to the early twentieth century. The visual emphasis of all three contributions is supplemented by over one hundred illustrations, and because much of this material-on the more "spectacular" visual aspects of Italian opera-has never before appeared in English, Opera on Stage will be welcomed by scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.
Author: Olga Racster
Publisher: London : Hutchinson & Company
ISBN:
Category : Ballet
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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