Academic literature on the topic 'Dvorak, Antonin - operas'

If Bedřich Smetana is thought to be the father of Czech national opera, Antonín Dvořák and Zdeněk Fibich would be his sons. Czech critics as well as the public expected that Smetana’s successors would bring Czech opera to international recognition. Dvořák and Fibich gave increased attention to opera composition during the 1890s and the beginning of the twentieth century. They both crowned their achievements with monumental operas on subjects with historical settings: Fibich’s The Fall of Arkona (1900) and Dvořák‘s Armida (1904). The reason for this apparent coincidence was, in part, that these works were written after Wagner’s operas and before the operatic successes of Richard Strauss, when it was possible to devise free combinations of symphonically composed scenes, arioso-like vocal lines influenced by verismo, and the dramaturgical effects of grand opera. As a praised model for successful historical opera might have served Karl Goldmark’s famous work Die Königin von Saba, especially in the case of Fibich’s last opera, which was explicitly compared with Goldmark’s opera. Operas on historical subjects form a little-known part of the works of Czech composers, but they extend from Smetana’s piece The Brandenburgers in Bohemia through the late operas of Dvořák and Fibich to Janáček’s two-part opera The Excursions of Mr Brouček. It is a line of operas that present an unforgettable counterpart to many successful Czech theatrical compositions – representative operas and intimate tragedies, comic operas and fairy tales, generally written on subjects from Czech villages and mythology, including Smetana’s Bartered Bride and Libuše, Fibich’s The Tempest and Šárka, Dvořák’s Jakobín, Kate and the Devil and Rusalka, Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s Eva, as well as Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa.

Abstract The paper assesses the professional theatres operating under the Association of Professional Theatres in the Czech Republic in the period 2011-2015 using the financial analysis, particularly the profitability indicator ratio (ROA, ROCE, ROE, ROS) and the rate of income self-sufficiency. The reason for this economic exploration of theatres is in the fact that the service they provide fall under collectively provided public goods (a common feature of most cultural institutions), and that the market is not able to effectively secure these goods on the profit principle. The J. K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, the Drak Theatre in Hradec Králové and the Moravian Slovakia Theatre in Uherské Hradiště have reported the best results of profitability indicators. Whereas the worst results in profitability have been reported for the North Bohemian Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Ústí nad Labem, the Antonín Dvořák Theatre in Příbram and the South Bohemian Theatre in České Budějovice. The rate of income self-sufficiency within 2011-2015 ranges from 12-55% of the total budget volume, and volume and shows a strong dependency of professional theatres on foreign resources, particularly from public resources of the local levels of the government being the most common funder of these cultural institutions. It turns out that, from the economic point of view, it is illogical to transform non-profit contributory organizations in culture with a public funder into a different legal form when the purpose of the establishment and the funder remain preserved. Better results are generally obtained from single-genre theatres and, in terms of the auditorium size, smaller theatres focusing on drama or children's production.

The tenor figure of princ, three-act opera, " Rusalka" by Antonín Dvořák, was a long time with its character, singing difficulty and technical extremity , a big challenge for me. So l decided after two years of studying this role, write a magister thesis about princ, think about his character and its overall by the creation from the very beginning to the hardest singing party at the end of the opera.

This dissertation examines five distinctly different comic operas by Antonín Dvořák, composed over a period of almost thirty years. I demonstrate ample evidence of their reflecting Dvořák's national identity as well as that of the Czech nation at a time of rising nationalism. I also demonstrate how Dvořák's compositional choices reveal his capacity as a musical dramatist of comic opera. I have examined and analyzed the libretti, full scores, and piano/vocal reductions of the five operas for references to national identity and for comedy. Musical elements such as dance rhythms, orchestral dudy (bagpipe) drone, the ascending interval of a fourth, and familiar folk tunes are interpreted as Slavic, Czech, or Bohemian. I have considered Dvořák's musical illustration of stereotypical stock characters and situations, and musical exploitation of social conventions and norms. Comic effects of recurrence, reversal, and pre- and post-outcome responses are achieved through acoustic signals such as unexpected tempo, dynamic, rhythmic, and harmonic shifts, and repetition in excess. I address the limited scholarship regarding Dvořák's operatic contributions — particularly as regards comic opera — in the field of opera studies, and challenge the argument that while there may be a generic "folk-tone," there is very little musical evidence of his national identity. Dvořák's ability to communicate far more to the audience than what is contained in the libretti alone is demonstrated not only in the broad scope of these five distinctly different operas, but also in the depth of musical support, including rhythm, melody, motivic development, and rich orchestration.
2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

In this Master's thesis, I attempt to capture the disparate semiosis of two musical genres - a traditional opera, Rusalka, which has a unique position in Czech national music, and a musical of the same name. On the basis of theoretical findings from semiotics as a science, from the approaches of F. de Saussure, C. S. Peirce and R. Barthes, and by means of semiotic analysis, the thesis unravels semantic elements that are specific for theatrical art. Attention is directed at the symbol as a major tool for semiosis and the classification of symbols on the basis of Peirce's three ontological categories. The analysis focuses on decoding the semiotic systems used in the two genres (the libretto, the music, the characters, the story, and the technical and symbolic means that are employed). The analysis also deals with the question of intertextuality and the ideological background of the text, and attempts in this way to compare the differences and/or the similarities of diverse semiotic codes of the same class, and to capture their originality and specificity. At the same time, the thesis is focused on the dominant semiotic code of the two genres. This is, on the one hand, determined by the systemic distinctions between opera and musical theatre, while, on the other hand, it is primarily predetermined by...