Early Music articles

Recent articles from Early Music

`Twittering and trilling': Swedish reaction to Metastasio.
November 1, 1998... THIS is a tale of three men--one a monarch, one a chronicler and historian, and one a court poet--and the story of the founding of a country's national opera. The king was the great Enlightenment monarch Gustaf III, who ruled Sweden from 1771 until his assassination in 1792. The chronicler...

Opera or oratorio?: Metastasio's sacred opere serie.
November 1, 1998... By established tradition, court employees involved in any way with artistic presentations in early 18th-century Vienna were expected to participate in a variety of different genres, including the opera, the oratorio, and oratorio's close associate, the sepolcro. Such participation suggests,...

Staging an opera: letters from the Cesarian poet.
November 1, 1998... PIETRO Metastasio was an upwardly mobile achiever. He seems to have been programmed to strive for success, from the time he was taken up and trained by the demanding humanist achiever Gravina, through the years in the 1720s when he was making his mark as an opera librettist in Naples,...

Reforming Achilles: gender, opera seria and the rhetoric of the enlightened hero.
November 1, 1998... METASTASIO'S libretto Achille in Sciro provides the great warrior Achilles with a unique opportunity to redefine the nature of operatic heroism, albeit from a peculiar vantage point. In one of the librettist's rare excursions into the world of male cross-dressing, Achilles (Achille) spends...

Dramatic dualities: Metastasio and the tradition of the opera pair.
November 1, 1998... Like other works of literature, dramas and operas sometimes form pairs, groups or sets. The trilogies of ancient Greek drama--performed with a concluding satyr-play--were the first examples of this tradition. In the 17th and 18th centuries the phenomenon was frequent in the European...