Week 10: Narrative & Characterization in Music III: Music Drama

Question 1

Bayreuth

Answer 1

A festival curated by Wagner for his pieces

Question 2

bel canto

Answer 2

Italian, “beautiful song”; Elegant Italian vocal style of the early nineteenth century marked by lyrical, embellished, and florid melodies that show off the beauty, agility, and fluency of the singer’s voice.

Question 3

Vincenzo Bellini

Answer 3

Younger contemporary of Rossini; preferred dramas of passion with fast, gripping action.
Bellini is known for long, sweeping, highly embellished, intensely emotional melodies that have a breadth, a flexibility of form, and a tinge of sadness

Question 4

Impresario

Answer 4

During the BAROQUE PERIOD, a businessman who managed and oversaw the production of OPERAS; today, someone who books and stages operas and other musical events.

Question 5

music drama

Answer 5

Nineteenth-century GENRE created by Richard Wagner in which drama and music become so interdependent as to express a kind of absolute oneness.

Question 6

La Scala

Answer 6

Milan’s opera house, where many of Verdi’s operas were first produced. It was built in the late eighteenth century by the Empress Maria Theresa.

Question 7

Giuseppe Verdi

Question 8

Wagner

Answer 8

19th Century composer that dominated German opera. He created the music drama and coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk

Question 9

Verismo

Answer 9

Italian, “realism”; Nineteenth-century operatic trend that presents everyday people in familiar situations, often depicting sordid or brutal events.