Topical vocabulary. Musical genres (styles):classical music (instrumental, vocal, chamber, symphony), opera, operetta, musical

Mussorgsky's importance and influence on later composers…

…are as insignificant as his output;

…are much greater than his output;

…are proportionate to his output.

Few composers …

…derived more from different original styles;

…developed less original and bold style;

…were more original and experimental in their music.

Mussorgsky's songs…

…show a realistic use of conversational Russian language;

…produce an impression of being inflexible;

…have texts abundant in inflections.

Mussorgsky's operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina…

…follow Romantic traditions of showing extraordinary individuals;

…show historical personalities in unity with their country and people;

…display a broad panorama of people's life at the expense of individual characters.

Mussorgsky's operas after Boris Godunov…

… were much more mature from a technical standpoint;

… display the same unorthodox use of tonality and harmony;

… lack the dramatic intensity the composer managed to achieve in Godunov.

Shortly after Mussorgsky's death his style…

…was undeservedly criticised;

… was correctly criticized;

… was overestimated.

Rimsky-Korsakov edited and "corrected" almost the entire output of the deceased composer…

… because he thought Mussorgsky's music had some weak points which could be corrected to better effect;

… with the intention to simplify Mussorgsky's music for orchestral performance;

… because he did not like his eccentricity.

Listen to some piece of Mussorgsky’s music and discuss your impressions.

4. Have you ever been to an opera house? What did you see? What was your impression?

What opera composers do you know? Do you know any famous opera singers?

You are going to read an article about the development of opera. Several sentences have been removed from its different parts. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1-8).

OPERA(Italian for "work"), is a drama set to music, as distinguished from plays in which music is merely incidental. Music has been a resource of the drama from the earliest times.

The real beginning of opera is connected with the first dramas that were set to music in order to be produced as musical works of art at the beginning of the 17th century.

In the last years of the 16th century a group of amateurs held meetings at the house of the Bardi in Florence, with the aim of trying experiments in emotional musical expression by the use of instruments and solo voices. Before this time there was no real opportunity for music-drama. The only high musical art of the 16th century was unaccompanied choral music.

The first pioneer in the new "monodic" movement seems to have been Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo. The first public production in the new style was Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600). The general effect of the new movement on contemporary imagination was characterized as something like that of laying a foundation-stone.

Meanwhile those composers who retained the mastery of polyphonic music tried to find a purely vocal and polyphonic solution of the problem of music-drama; and the Amfiparnasso of Orazio Vecchi (1594) is not alone, though it is by far the most remarkable, among attempts to make a music-drama out of a series of madrigals. From the woodcuts which adorn the first edition of the Amfiparnasso it has been conjectured that the actors sang one voice each, while the rest of the harmony was supplied by singers behind the stage.

With the decadence of the madrigal, Monteverde brought a real musical power to the new style.

At the beginning of the 17th century no young musician of lively artistic receptivity could fail to be profoundly stirred by Monteverde's Orfeo (1602) and Arianna (1608), works in which the resources of instruments were developed with the same archaic boldness, the same grasp of immediate emotional effect and the same lack of artistic organization as the harmonic resources. The spark of Monteverde's genius produced in musical history a result more like an explosion than an enlightenment; and the emotional rhetoric of his art was so uncontrollable, and at the same time so much more impressive in suggestion than in realization, that we cannot be surprised that the next definite step in the history of opera took the direction of mere musical form, and was not only undramatic but anti-dramatic.

The system of free musical declamation known as recitative is said to have been used by Emilio del Cavalieri as early as 1588, and it was almost the only means of vocal expression conceivable by the pioneers of opera. Formal melody, such as that of popular songs, was beneath their dignity. But, in the absence of any harmonic system but that of the church modes, which was incapable of assimilating the new "unprepared discords," and in the utter chaos of early experiments in instrumentation, formal melody proved a godsend as the novelty of recitative faded.

By the early days of Alessandro Scarlatti, before the end of the 17th century, the art of tune-making had blossomed into the musically safe and effective form of the aria. From this time until the death of Handel the history of opera is simply the history of the aria; except in so far as in France, under Lully, it is also the history of ballet-music, the other main theatrical occasion for the art of tune-making. With opera before Gluck there is little interest in tracing schools and developments, for the musical art had as mechanical a connexion with drama as it had with the art of scene-painting, and neither it nor the drama which was attached to it showed any real development at all, though the librettist Metastasio presented as imposing a figure in 18th-century Italian literature as Handel presented in Italian opera.

Before this period of stagnation we find an almost solitary and provincial outburst of life in Purcell's art (1658-1695). Whether he is producing genuine opera (as in the unique case of Dido and Aeneas) or merely incidental music to plays (as in the so-called opera King Arthur), his deeply inspired essays in dramatic music are remarkable in their historic isolation.

The real reason for the stagnation of high opera before Gluck is that the forms of music known before 1750 could not express dramatic change without losing artistic organization.

The opportunity for reform came with the rise of the sonata style. It was fortunate for Gluck that the music of his time was too vigorously organized to be upset by new discoveries. Gluck was a much greater artist than Monteverde, but he too was not overloaded with academic mastery. But instead of memories of a Golden Age, Gluck had behind him 150 years of harmonic and orchestral knowledge of good and evil. He also had a perfect sense of symphonic form and his melodic power was generally of the highest order. It is often said that his work was too far in advance of his time to establish his intended reform. If this means that undramatic Italian operas continued to outnumber those dramatic masterpieces which no smaller man could achieve, the statement is as true as it is of every great artist.

The influence of Gluck on Mozart was profound, not only where it is relevant to the particular type of libretto, as in Idomeneo, but also on the broad dramatic basis which includes Greek tragedy and the 18th-century comedy of manners.

Mozart, whose first impulse was always to make his music coherent in itself, for some time continued to cultivate side by side with his growing polyphony and freedom of movement certain Italian formalities which, though musically effective and flattering to singers, were dramatically vicious. But these features, though they spoil Idomeneo, correspond to much that in Gluck's operas shows mere helplessness; and in comic opera they may even become dramatically appropriate.

Mozart always extracts the utmost musical effect from every situation in his absurd and often tiresome libretti (especially in vocal ensemble), while his musical effects are always such as give dramatic life to what in other hands are conventional musical forms.

It cannot be said that in any high artistic sense Italian comic opera has developed continuously since Mozart. The vocal athleticism of singers; the acceptance and great development by Mozart of what we may call symphonic (as distinguished from Handelian) forms of aria and ensemble; and the enlargement of the orchestra; these processes gave the Italian composers of Mozart's and later times golden opportunities for lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity, while the music was steadily degraded. Composers and spectators grew indifferent to the mood of the libretto.

But with the Rossinian decline Italian opera once more became as purely a pantomimic concert as in the Handelian period; and we must not ignore the difference that it was now a concert of very vulgar music, the weakness of which was only increased by the growing range and interest of dramatic subjects.

Occasionally the drama pierced through the empty breeziness of the music; and so the spirit of Shakespeare, even when killed in an Italian libretto unsuccessfully set to music by Rossini, proved so powerful that one spectator of Rossini's Otello is recorded to have started out of his seat at the catastrophe, exclaiming "Good Heavens! the tenor is murdering the soprano!"