L'Orfeo

Orfeo, officially L’Orfeo, was a momentous opera piece that was composed by Claudio Monteverdi. Written in five acts, the storyline that follows the underlying music delves into many aspects of humanity. Happiness, love, religion, death, and loss, concomitant with heartbreak, are the main themes expressed and explored which yield foresight into the time period Monteverdi himself lived in, as well as the influence of the Venice, the floating city. The opera was revolutionary for its time essentially from the Greek influence, but even more so because of the accompanying music as it was more complex on many levels due to the difficulty as well as the custom innovations Monteverdi made to instrument sections. Through the use of musical deviation…

Claudio Monteverdi is perhaps considered the founding father of opera, although he was not the first composer of the art form. Monteverdi had an ear for polyphony and a keen sense of dramatic action (Riding & Dunton-Downer: 2006 pg. 55), making him the ideal composer of Opera, who would further enhance works of his predecessors which lacked strong sense of theatrical effect or musical direction. (Raeburn: 1998 pg. 23) ‘L’Orfeo’, Monteverdi’s first opera written in 1607 gained widespread appeal…

melodic ornaments ruin it.” (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1765). In contrast, the French recitative fill theirs with as many melodic ornaments as possible. “Their language, containing more consonants, more rough, more difficult to pronounce, demands more slowness, and it is on these drawn out sounds that they exhaust the cadences, the accents, the ports-de-voix, even roulades…” (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1765). The French recitative was developed by Giovanni – Baptista Lulli, known as Jean – Baptiste…

maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. This is where he stayed until his death in 1643. With his death, his music also became much less popular until the nineteenth century when it was rediscovered and a new appreciation was found. During his last few years of life, Monteverdi was able to complete two more great works of opera: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1641) and l'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642). Many sources say he wrote approximately eighteen operas but the only ones…

compositions featuring this new style of writing for the trumpet. Edward Tarr wrote, “A famous cantata, Su le sponde del Tebro, whose first aria, Contentatevi, demands a very good trumpeter, especially if as as notated in the original two stanzas are performed. . . Finally, in Naples, where he composed the majority of his operas A. Scarlatti wrote many operas with highly virtuosic trumpet arias.” Claudio Monteverdi’ is often credited with introducing the trumpet into the operatic setting in his…

The issue of gender is very much present in nowadays musicological debates. Researchers present their different views on the topic, which may be opposing in some cases. Just like popular music influences our perception of gender, classical music is also one of the most important genres to consider when talking about gender representation. We can recognize several patterns of gender representation also in Monteverdi’s operas and connect them with the society on the turn from Renaissance to early…

Susan McClary believed, that as film and media continue the discourse on gender identities today, early-modern opera was a pioneer in the construction of gender identities to the public sphere. The construction of gender became necessary when presented portrayals of the world had to differentiate between male or female characters, as one sex could play the other. These constructions were shaped by the time and place in which the work was presented. The issue on how to represent women was…

fifteen. This passion at a young age came from him studying with the director of music at Cremona cathedral, Marc ' Antonio Ingegneri (Arnold). His first published music included motets and sacred madrigals, which were influenced by him working in the cathedral. He first began working in a court in northern Italy as a vocalist, then as a music director. He was appointed as master of music in 1602 by Vincenzo, who was the Duke of Mantua. Monteverdi married another court singer, with whom he had…

implementing their principles of virtuosic music. The earliest composition of recitative also came from the Florentine Camerata (Ulrich 68). Composers who sought to adopt the style of recitative found it difficult to incorporate because of its strict form that the Florentine Camerata originally designed, and also would not modify. In the coming decades, the original recitative had been revised. Monteverdi was an important figure in adopting the recitative style in the Baroque period. To do so,…