Understanding Italian Opera

Contents

• Preface
• 1: What is Opera?
• Some definitions
• In praise of librettists
• Italian versification
• Poetic structures and musical consequences
• Two examples from Mozart
• An exotic and irrational entertainment?
• 2: Giovanni Francesco Busenello and Claudio Monteverdi,
• L'incoronazione di Poppea (Venice, 1643)
• Monteverdi in Venice
• The first operas
• But here the matter is represented differently
• Speaking and singing
• Seductive Poppea
• Seneca's death
• Ottavia in exile
• Ecstasies of love
• 3: Nicola Francesco Haym and George Frideric Handel,
• Giulio Cesare in Egitto (London, 1724)
• Arcadian reforms
• Adapting Bussani
• Recitatives and arias
• Some alternatives
• Fly, my heart, to the sweet enchantment
• Taming Cleopatra
• Cesare returns
• All's well...
• 4: Lorenzo da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
• Le nozze di Figaro (Vienna, 1786)
• ... these Italian gentlemen are very civil to your face
• Translating Beaumarchais
• Aria forms
• A duet, a trio, and a sextet
• Finales
• Readings and messages
• 5: Francesco Maria Piave and Giuseppe Verdi,
• Rigoletto (Venice, 1851)
• Le Roi s'amuse
• Cantabiles and cabalettas
• Duets
• Arias and monologues
• A quartet ... a storm ... and a death
• 6: Giuseppe Giacosa, Luigi Illica, and Giacomo Puccini,
• La Boheme (Turin, 1896)
• Bohemian rhapsodies
• A publisher, two librettists, and a rival
• A missing act
• Verse and music
• Formless forms?
• Operatic realisms
• Mimi dies
• 7: Afterthoughts