opera: German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century
German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century
The ballad opera eventually led to the singspiel, the German comic opera with spoken dialogue, which was to reach its highest development in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although the early court opera of Germany showed preference for the Italian school—Frederick the Great is said to have compared German singing to the neighing of horses—in the 18th cent. German composers began to turn their attention to singspiel.
Georg Philipp Telemann had anticipated the technique of Pergolesi's
The increasing taste of the 18th-century public for musical portrayal of emotion in a more earnest manner and on a more human scale had its most significant impact on
The unity of drama and music was continued by Mozart, through his explorations of and expansions on the comic styles. His music manages to present characters familiar to every age, with all the virtues and foibles of the human race. Goethe compared him with Shakespeare. His major librettist was Lorenzo Da Ponte, who produced texts for three of Mozart's greatest works:
Sections in this article:
- Introduction
- Twentieth-Century Opera
- Russian Opera
- Verdi and the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy
- Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
- The Development of French Grand Opera and Opéra Comique
- The Romantic Movement in Germany
- German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century
- The Development of English Opera
- Italian Opera of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
- Early French Opera
- The Baroque in Rome and Venice
- Florentine Beginnings
- Characteristics
- Bibliography
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