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Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.
Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.
Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.
Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, this book provides an often entertaining insight into Lully's once-proud Royal Academy of Music.
During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien régime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comédie-Française.
After situating the libretti in the context of French classicism, the author first discusses the prologues to the Quinault-Lully operas, then devotes a chapter to each of the libretti in which he examines such traditional literary elements as performance history, plot, characterization, and style, as well as issues more specifically related to musical theater. The concluding chapter summarizes what opera can tell us about French classicism and explores in depth some of the key theoretical issues such as representation, imitation, and recognition.
Italian ballet in the eighteenth century was dominated by dancers trained in the style known as "grotesque"—a virtuoso style that combined French ballet technique with a vigorous athleticism that made Italian dancers in demand all over Europe. Gennaro Magri’s Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo, the only work from the eighteenth century that explains the practices of midcentury Italian theatrical dancing, is a starting point for investigating this influential type of ballet and its connections to the operatic and theatrical genres of its day. The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage examines the theatrical world of the ballerino grottesco, Magri’s own career as a dancer in Italy and Vienna, the genre of pantomime ballet as it was practiced by Magri and his colleagues across Europe, the relationships between dance and pantomime in this type of work, the music used to accompany pantomime ballets, and the movement vocabulary of the grotesque dancer. Appendices contain scenarios from eighteenth-century pantomime ballets, including several of Magri’s own devising; an index to the step-vocabulary discussed in Magri’s book; and an index of dancers in Italy known to have performed as grotteschi. Illustrations, music examples, and dance notations also supplement the text.
This is the first book for a century to explore the development of French opera with spoken dialogue from its beginnings. Musical comedy in this form came in different styles and formed a distinct genre of opera, whose history has been obscured by neglect. Its songs were performed in private homes, where operas themselves were also given. The subject-matter was far wider in scope than is normally thought, with news stories and political themes finding their way onto the popular stage. In this book, David Charlton describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical' popular works.
Publisher description
Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos, a short ballet performed at the court of Louis XIV, is of major importance to the study of French Baroque dance. This facsimile reproduction of the entire manuscript is accompanied by a comprehensive study of the work itself and the context in which it was created and performed. Dated 1688, it provides a wealth of new and detailed information on numerous aspects of theatrical dance. It differs from the known choreographic sources in many respects, the two most important being the completeness of all its components--choreography, music, and text--and the use of a previously unknown dance notation system.