Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1968. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> One of the programmes for the Antient Concerts during 1845 includes a scena from Cesti’s Orontea. But in general the music of the seven-teenth century has only lately attracted interest and in consequence given pleasure. The history of the opera both in this and the following century is however still little known. And the aim of this study has been to trace the origins of the component parts that were to make it an independent and new art form. The men who wrote the first works of this nature were as conscious as their successors in the nineteenth century that an opera cannot be enjoyed ‘by reading a romance of Goethe in a picture-gallery adorned with statues during the perfor-mance of a Beethoven symphony’. There is always the element of the Gesamtkunstwerk in its nature. And for this reason in a general history of opera it is difficult to do justice to the various factors that combine to make the successful work. It is only in a narrow field that the origins of the music the poetry and the stagecraft can be traced before they fuse into the whole. The Venetian favole in musica discussed in this book are the first works to be produced under more or less modern conditions and have therefore a particular importance for the reader interested in the his-tory of a form that played so vital a part in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life. For the opera perhaps more than any other art occupied the minds and satisfied the tastes of musicians and the general public at the time. To speak of the general public in connexion with opera before 1637 is perhaps an anachronism. For performance was then confined for reasons of expense and social custom to the numerous European courts. But the opening of the first public opera house in Venice meant that the performances could be financed from the sale of tickets. Venetian noblemen formed companies to build and speculate in opera houses and the rows of boxes were rented by their friends or by travellers who flocked to the city to enjoy the new art. There is no question of distinguishing the kind of audience that attended these performances with the audience of an older generation. (MP)