Part 1: ‘The opera architect Girolamo Sartorio (1630s/40s–1707) and the dissemination of opera in Northern Europe’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, pt.1, 75/1 (2018), 2–13 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Opera as Institution: Networks and Professions (1730-1917), 2019
Cristina Scuderi, Ingeborg Zechner (Eds.); LIT Verlag, ISBN 978-3-643-91149-0 pp. 37-53 The Viennese Kärntnertortheater, led by the tenor Francesco Borosini and the ballet dancer Joseph Carl Selliers, originally obtained a court privilege to perform comedies (1728–1748). Yet from 1730 on, its managers looked further and engaged Italian singers in order to stage Italian operas; among them Maria Camati (La Farinella).
2010
_L’ingresso alla gioventù di Claudio Nerone_ (music: Antonio Gianettini/Giannettini, libretto: Giambattista Neri) was commissioned by Duke Francesco II d’Este for the formal entrance of his bride, Princess Margherita Farnese, into Modena on 9 November 1692. Set against a tense political environment that centred around issues of succession and government, this lavish gala production represented a statement of propagandist display and conspicuous ‘court’ celebration given in the somewhat contradictory context of the ‘public’ Teatro Fontanelli before honoured guests and an ‘upper’-class ticket-buying public. In 1685, Duke Francesco had effectively contracted out opera in Modena to this privately-run theatre. While _L’ingresso_ appeared to represent the culmination of this strategy, its indulgent extravagance seemingly caused the huge loss on production. Opera under Francesco came to an abrupt end. _L’ingresso_ has since lain virtually untouched by musicologists; and while there have been a number of valuable studies into music under the duke (most noticeably with regard to oratorio, cantata, and instrumental music), there has been no in-depth study of opera. This thesis seeks to rectify this oversight by reporting upon opera production under Duke Francesco through a review of the Teatro Fontanelli archives, and a full reconstruction and audit of the _L’ingresso_ financial accounts. These not only offer an extraordinary insight into the administration and staging of _L’ingresso_ (and the cause of the loss suffered), but also identify the existence of a mutually beneficial policy that delivered opera for Francesco against a seemingly autonomous and potentially profitable Teatro Fontanelli through an accounting system which protected the impresario from his losses and liabilities on production. _L’ingresso_ thus presents a rare opportunity to document the mechanisms of opera patronage and production under Duke Francesco II d’Este, and to provide a valuable insight into the reality of provincial Italian opera towards the end of the seventeenth century. Paul Atkin Royal Holloway March 2010
The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety. This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here. In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 30/2-3, 2019
This article addresses several historiographical questions about narratives of nineteenth century Italian opera by discussing the international career of prima donna Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani during the 1830s and 1840s. A number of hitherto overlooked letters between the singer and Carlo Balocchino, impresario of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, provide important insights into Tacchinardi-Persiani's strategies of self-representation in the context of a dynamic operatic network that included the Italian States, Vienna, Paris and London. By revealing shifting power dynamics between opera impresarios, performers and composers, these letters, read in parallel with reviews and other writings of the time, offer a fresh look at the economic, ideological and artistic factors that contributed to the shifting geography of the European operatic landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century.