Music Appreciation: Romantic Period Opera

Music and Art Song

• A song written to be sung in recital, typically with piano accompaniment and often set to a poem, is known as an art song.
• The Kundiman is the art song of the Philippines with folk-music influence set to texts, often referred to as classical love songs.

Opera Composers of the Romantic Period

Franz Peter Schubert

• Developed "Lieder", a German word that means song, setting poetry to music, performed by a single vocalist and piano.
• Famous compositions include: Ave Maria, Swan Song, and Unfinished Symphony.

Giuseppe Verdi

• Wrote operas with political overtones for a middle-class audience.
• Characters are ordinary people, not from the royal family like those found in German operas.
• First opera "Oberto" was performed in La Scala, the most important opera house at the time.
• Famous compositions include: La Traviata, Rigoletto, Falstaff, Otello, and Aida.

Giacomo Puccini

• Belonged to a group of composers who stressed realism, drawing material from everyday life.
• Rejected heroic themes from mythology and history.
• Performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida convinced him that his true vocation was opera.
• Famous compositions include: La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, and Turandot.

Richard Wagner

• Introduced new ideas in harmony and form, including extremes of chromaticism.
• Developed leitmotif, a repeating melodic phrase in music that represents a character, setting, emotion, or theme.
• Famous compositions include: Tristan and Isolde, The Valkyrie, The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, Parsifal, and The Flying Dutchman.

Georges Bizet

• Most famous opera is "Carmen", although it initially received poor reviews and attendance.

Theatrical Elements of an Opera

• Opera is a theatrical work consisting of a dramatic text that has been set to music and staged with scenery, costumes, and movement.

Elements of an Opera

• Libretto: the text of an opera.
• Librettist: a person who writes the text of an opera or other long vocal work.
• Score: has all the musical notes, words, and ideas to help the performers tell the story.
• Orchestra: an ensemble that is comprised of string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments.
• Recitative: a type of singing in which the soloist adopts the rhythm and delivery of ordinary speech to move the plot forward.
• Aria: an air or solo singing part sung by a principal character.
• Ensemble: a piece that is sung by two or more characters at the same time.
• Chorus: a group of singers with more than one person singing each part, like a choir, often representing groups such as soldiers, priests, peasants, etc.