Opera on Stage (Storia Dell'opera Italiana, 5) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226045919 ISBN 13: 9780226045917

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

<div><i>The History of Italian Opera</i> 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.<br><br><i>Opera on Stage</i>, 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, <i>Opera on Stage</i> will be welcomed by scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.</div>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<div><b>Lorenzo Bianconi</b> is a professor of musical dramaturgy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the author of <i>Music in the Seventeenth Century</i>. <br><br><b>Giorgio Pestelli</b> is a professor of music history at the University of Turin, Italy, and music critic for <i>La Stampa</i>. He is the author of <i>The Age of Mozart and Beethoven</i>. Together they edited <i>Opera Production and Its Resources</i>, also published by the University of Chicago Press.</div>

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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.

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The History of Italian Opera

By Giorgio Pestelli

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © <1998- Giorgio Pestelli
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226045919
1 - Stage and Set

MERCEDES VIALE FERRERO

Theatrical Spaces and Designers

1. SPACE AND THE SET

It is an obvious fact that operas are performed in a theatrical space that includes a set. Indeed, there is a plurality of such spaces and sets and thus also of reciprocal interrelations among them. The performance takes place in a real space that is (usually) a stage, which is made out of tangible materials and covers a given area that can be defined in mathematical terms and represented graphically. However, this same stage also conjures up a fictitious space in which the events represented take place. Moreover, it is at the same time a symbolic space: the visual expression of the potentially conflicting inventions, intentions, and interpretations of the librettist, the composer, the singers, the stage designer, the director, and so on.

By the same token, operas are performed because there is a ready audience to attend the performance, and this implies the availability of a place in which individuals unite to become an audience: in other words, a real space, or auditorium. Like the stage itself, the auditorium is a quantifiable architectural structure. Yet in its own way it is also a somewhat fictitious space, in that it relates to the fictional events of the drama that absorbs the assembled individuals and elicits their consent, dissent, compassion, or indifference. In this sense it is also a symbolic space: an enclosure containing a (homogeneous or heterogeneous) society that appears to be a (convergent or divergent) projection of the society at large extra theatrum, and hence also of its organization, whether institutional, hierarchical, economic, or whatever. These two components (stage and auditorium) are interconnected both materially and in the mind of the viewer: the spectator must be able not only to see and hear the show but also to grasp its meaning; for its part, the show aims at obtaining the audiences approval and thus also its intellectual comprehension and emotional involvement. But how much of this is specific to opera as such? Are there theatrical spaces and sets that are peculiar to opera? The question could be addressed in technical terms, albeit somewhat unsatisfactorily. For example, the theatrical space devoted to opera performance requires a place for the orchestra, whereas this is not necessarily the case for plays. Yet it is for ballet. Likewise, theatrical space should be so structured as to carry the singers voices clearly everywhere. However, optimal acoustics are also essential to spaces used for the performance of plays. An insistently reiterated conceptual distinction was introduced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: scene changes (and thus also a theatrical space in which they were possible) were typical of opera, whereas plays were bound by the Aristotelian concept of unity and thus required no such thing. Actually, scene changes existed well before the birth of opera. Moreover, there were operas with a fixed set just as there were plays with many scenes.

2. SPACES AND OPERA GENRES

The difficulty (indeed, impossibility) of laying down fixed rules for establishing optimal spaces specifically devoted to opera performance is probably due to the fact that opera itself comprises various genres requiring different types of spectacle that may vary according to time, context, audience, theatrical organization, and so on. One set designer (Pietro Gonzaga) defined his art as musique des yeux, which suggests a perspective that changes in relation to variations in musical expression. However, the question cannot be reduced to a mere temporal succession of tastes and styles, structures and images. Clearly, there are bound to be conspicuous differences between the staging of Bellerofonte by Nolfi (librettist) and Sacrati (composer) at the Teatro Novissimo in 1642 (the auditorium was probably horseshoe-shaped with steps; and Giacomo Torellis sets involved nine changes, or thirteen if one includes the appearance of the machines activated in full view); of La clemenza di Tito by Metastasio and Leo at the Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo in 1753 (auditorium with boxes; sets by Antonio Jolli involving seven changes but no stage machinery); of La traviata by Piave and Verdi at La Fe-nice in 1853 (auditorium with boxes; sets by Giuseppe Bertoja with four changes, none of them in full view); or of Prometeo by Cacciari and Nono at the San Lorenzo in 1984 (auditorium specifically equipped for this event). This choice of examples deliberately involves a principal variant (time) that determines a number of subvariants but also presentstwo constants: the entertainments were all performed in the same city, Venice; and the theaters were all open to a paying public.

If we eliminate the time variant, we shall still find essential differences between the fixed-set staging (in the Argos countryside) of Silvia by Capeci and Scarlatti at the Teatro della Regina di Polonia in Rome in 1710 and the staging of Tito e Berenice by Capeci and Caldara at the Teatro Capranica in Rome in 1714, where the sets designed by Filippo Juvarra involved ten changes and one mechanical apparatus. It might be argued here that the decisive variant was accessibility: the queen of Polands private theater was a domestic structure reserved for a social and intellectual lite, whereas the Capranica was open to the paying public. This, however, is not the case, because in 1713 Ifigenia in Tauri by Capeci and Scarlatti was staged at the queens domestic theater with sets designed by Filippo Juvarra that involved ten scene changes, albeit with no machinery. So at this point it seems logical to argue that differences in staging should be related to the musical genre of the entertainment. Silvia is described as pastoral, whereas both Tito e Berenice and Ifigenia in Tauri are drammi per musica. It is significant that this meticulous distinction of genres became established in the early eighteenth century, in other words in the century that was later to impose a rational separation of operatic genres and insist on the concept of verisimilitude in the staging. As a consequence, the sets had to be designed in a way that was appropriate for either serious or comic opera. Compare the settings required in the following two operas (Milan, Teatro Interinale, 1777):

Ezio (Metastasio and Mortellari): *Roman Forum / Imperial chambers / Palatine Gardens / *Gallery with great balcony . . . with a view of Rome / Atrium of the prisons / *Capitoline Hill

Le astuzie amorose (Cerlone and Paisiello): Ground-floor room / Room / Garden / Room / Lovely garden / Room / Garden / Courtyard

Ezio (a serious opera) called for six changes, three of them (marked with an asterisk) involving specific sites; Le astuzie (a comic opera) involved eight changes, though these actually corresponded to only three types (room, garden, and courtyard) and generic, everyday settings. In other words, for comic operas the simple sorts of sets that were part of the theater or company equipment were deemed adequate and could be adapted for use in numerous different shows.

Theatrical managers and directors became so convinced of the flexibility of their repertory of sets that, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theory became somewhat...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226045919
• ISBN 13: 9780226045917
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Herausgeber: Bianconi Lorenzo, Pestelli Giorgio, Singleton Kate
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar