Tesis sobre el tema "Prove in opera"

With its bold combination of epic style and vernacular prose, François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) created a stir that preoccupied the literary, theatrical, musical, and art world throughout the eighteenth century. My dissertation places the novel at the centre of a crucial exchange between the French revisionist movement – with its mandate to redefine neoclassical theatre – and Italian dramma per musica in the second half of the eighteenth century. While littérateurs like Antoine Houdar de la Motte and Voltaire argued publicly over the theoretical viability of prose tragedy on the back of Télémaque, the operatic stage was actively absorbing and experimenting with principles of de la Motte’s new brand of theatre: a less compounded application of the Aristotelian unities, a bolder approach to character portrayal, a painterly approach to scenography, and an integration of tropes from the epic. I rely on two case studies to argue that dramma per musica began to adopt specific principles of de la Motte’s contentious “prose tragedy” genre: Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi’s Mitridate libretto (set by Quirino Gasparini in 1767 and Mozart in 1770), which was based on the same Racine play that incited de la Motte and Voltaire’s animosity; and Giambattista Varesco’s Idomeneo, based on Danchet’s adaptation of Fénelon. Literary scholarship, familiar with the heated paper war incited by Fénelon’s novel thanks to Fabienne Moore and Romira Worville’s research, has so far paid little heed to the eighteenth-century operatic stage as the most prominent and sustained reworking of the neoclassical tragic tradition. In answer to Reinhard Strohm’s appeal to synthesize literary and musicological approaches towards a cross-disciplinary poetics of Enlightenment opera, I show that dramma per musica actively reconfigures a neoclassical tradition in flux alongside the century’s noisiest literary revisionist movement, reimagining theatrical praxis as part of a broader poetics of arts and letters.

Si l’opéra sur un livret en prose ne se manifeste publiquement en Europe qu’au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles, dans les domaines russe, puis français, enfin allemand et tchèque, des essais de chant de prose et des réflexions sur ses conditions de possibilités sont cependant intervenus, en France, dès le XVIIIe siècle. Envisagée comme forme verbale apériodique, la prose peut ainsi être considérée comme étant au fondement du genre de l’opéra. D’une part, en effet, dans la tragédie lyrique et auparavant dans l’opéra italien, des vers mêlés apériodiques sont d’emblée associés à un chant lui aussi largement apériodique, notamment dans le récitatif. Cette caractéristique formelle du récitatif est soulignée par la notion analogique péjorative de « prose musicale », élaborée dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, en France et en Allemagne, par les partisans de la mélodie périodique italienne. D’autre part, l’ opposition entre le régime du récitatif et le régime de l’air peut être interprétée comme un conflit entre un principe dramatique linéaire de prosa oratio et un principe lyrique circulaire de versus. Sur un plan stylistique, la notion formelle de prose s’articule en outre à celle de prosaïsme, non seulement dans le drame lyrique naturaliste en prose, mais plus généralement dans le chant de type récitatif, considéré par certains théoriciens comme la prose du chant, parce qu’il est apériodique et dévolu aux matières de moindre valeur lyrique. Cette articulation entre les plans formel et stylistique s’opère notamment dans la prosodie musicale, et plus spécifiquement à travers le traitement de l’e caduc, qui fait l’objet de débats idéologiques touchant aux limites entre le naturel et le prosaïsme. Les tentatives de divers compositeurs, poètes et théoriciens pour dépasser l’antagonisme entre le vers et la prose conduisent dès lors à repenser le genre, non en termes de dichotomie formelle et stylistique, mais comme une unité organique. Celle-ci prend ainsi la forme d’un poème lyrico-dramatique, qui s’incarne dans un discours poético-musical associant chant, orchestre, et silence. Le problème du chant de la prose dans l’opéra apparaît donc comme un révélateur des enjeux génériques, esthétiques, voire idéologiques du théâtre lyrique<br>Although prose opera only appeared in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Russian, French, German and Czech opera, some ventures into prose singing and reflections about it did occur in France as early as the eighteenth century. Seen as an aperiodic verbal form, prose can be considered to have been an essential part of the operatic genre from the beginning. Indeed, aperiodic free mixed verse is used in French tragédie en musique, and before that in Italian opera, in association with largely non-periodic singing, especially in recitative. This formal characteristic of recitative is summed up in the metaphoric and pejorative phrase of “musical prose”, which was created in France and Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century by admirers of the Italian periodic melody. This opposition between two modes of singing, recitative-like and aria-like singing, can be seen as a conflict between two contradictory principles in opera: on the one hand, a prosa oratio principle, whose linearity represents the dramatic progressive succession ; on the other hand, a versus principle, whose periodic circle constitutes the traditional form of lyrics. On a stylistic level, prose also has to do with prosaic matters and language, not only in the naturalistic drame lyrique, but more generally in recitative singing. The latter is sometimes considered the prose of music, not only because of its form, but also because it deals with less lyrical matters than aria. This relationship between formal and stylistic levels is particularly tight in prosodic matters, especially in the treatment of the famous mute e, which provokes multiple ideological debates concerning natural, realistic, or prosaic styles of diction. Attempts to solve this problematic opposition between verse and prose logics led various musicians, librettists and theorists to go beyond formal and stylistic dichotomy and to rethink opera as an organic whole: in the form of a lyric-dramatic poem and a poetic-musical speech, where singing, orchestra, and silence are combined. The problem of prose singing in opera thus clearly reveals the generic, aesthetic, and ideological issues concerning lyric theatre