Chapter 44-47 Vocabulary Flashcards
Opera Seria (Serious Opera)
Tragic Italian opera.
Opera Buffa (The Italian version of comic opera)
Italian comic opera, sung throughout.
Bel Canto
“Beautiful singing”; elegant Italian vocal style characterized by florid melodic lines delivered by voices of great agility, smoothness, and purity of tone.
Singspiel
Comic German drama with spoken dialogue; the immediate predecessor of Romantic German opera.
Melodrama
Scenes with spoken dialogue or minimal singing, but striking orchestral accompaniment to intensify the dramatic effect of the words.
Music Drama
Wagner’s term for his operas.
Leitmotifs
“Leading motive”, or basic recurring theme, representing a person, object, or idea; widely used in Wagner’s music dramas.
Ballet
A dance form featuring a staged presentation of group or solo dancing with music, costumes, and scenery.
Masque
English genre of aristocratic entertainment that combined vocal and instrumental music with poetry and dance, developed during the sixteenth centuries.
Pas de Deux
A dance for two, an established feature of classical ballet.
Celesta
Percussion instrument resembling a miniature upright piano, with tuned metal plates struck by hammers that are operated by a keyboard.
Post-Romantic era
A trend at the turn of the twentieth century in which nineteenth-century musical characteristics like chromatic harmony and expansive melodies are carried to the extreme.
Exoticism
Musical style in which rhythms, melodies, or instruments evoke the color and atmosphere of far-off lands.
Verismo
Operatic “realism”, a style popular in Italy in the 1800s, which tried to bring naturalism into the lyric theater.
Pentatonic
A five-note pattern used in some African, Far Eastern, and Native American musics; can also be found in Western music as an example of exoticism. See also gapped scale.
