A brief look at the history of Italian opera The notes and rhythms of the song matched the natural speech inflections of a good actor or orator. The Camerata advocated a simple chordal accompaniment, a texture known as monody. The typical solo song of their time still had a polyphonic accompaniment, perhaps on a lute. Members of the Camerata concluded that only a new kind of solo song could truly move an audience emotionally. That is, several different melodic lines were sung or played at the same time. The music of their time had what is known as a polyphonic texture. According to their research, Greek singing produced a much more powerful emotional effect on audiences than their own modern music. They believed that the Greeks had sung all the plays. They featured both solo and choral singing, large instrumental ensembles, dancing, and elaborate stage machinery.īeginning in the 1570s, a group of Florentine nobles now known as the Camerata formed to discuss ancient drama. Over time, the intermedi for these occasions became elaborate enough to overshadow the comedy. Nobles often ordered comedies with intermedi for important occasions. At first, they simply served as a musical interlude with singing and dancing loosely connected by mythological theme. The comedies had five acts, so there were usually six intermedi, one before the play, one after, and four between the acts. So to mark divisions between acts, producers of these entertainments devised the intermedio. In other words, we could say opera descended from the very highest of highbrow culture. They revived ancient Greek comedies, for example. Its antecedents were primarily Renaissance entertainments for the nobility. It started in Italy around 1600 as entertainment for the nobility. Opera unites music, poetry, drama, and spectacle in the most elaborate and expensive of all art forms. By 1989 every seat for every performance of the season had been sold before opening night.Sketch of the set for Inferno, the fourth intermedio of La Pellegrina, designed by Bernardo Buontalenti Under Carol Fox (1956–1981) and Ardis Krainik (1981–1997), the Lyric found subscriber support in a broadening base of business and professional patronage. Opera was reborn in Chicago with the creation of the Park, as well as making success impossible for subsequent companies in the 1930s. Had a major impact on opera in Chicago, putting an end to the Civic Opera and summertime operas at Of modern design at Madison and Wacker Drive, six days after the stock market crash of 1929. The Chicago Civic Opera moved into the Civic Opera House, a 45-story The establishment of a permanent resident opera company in Chicago, together with the new venues of radio and the phonograph, democratized opera by making it available to a new and broader audience. Together, the two Chicago companies brought opera to 62 cities, large and small, between 19. Like its predecessor, the Civic Opera toured nationally. Its president, the utilities magnate Samuel Insull, pursued a businesslike, populist policy designed to broaden the social and financial basis of opera's support. Support for opera was by then so widespread that a new organization, the Chicago Civic Opera, was formed almost at once. The lavish season of 1921–22 included among its triumphs the world premiere of Prokofiev'sīut closed with a deficit, covered by the McCormicks, of over a million dollars, which ended the company. The dominating operatic personality in Chicago from 1910 to 1931 was lyric soprano and actress Mary Garden, who was appointed general director (or “directa,” as she insisted on being called) after Campanini's death. It established the city as an operatic center of national prominence, thanks in large part to music director and conductor Cleofante Campanini's openness to experimentation and innovation and to the patronage of Harold and Edith McCormick. It hosted touring companies until 1910, when the Chicago Grand Opera Company was opened as the city's first permanent resident company. The Chicago Opera Festival Association lobbied for a new permanent operaĪn architectural and acoustical marvel, was opened downtown. Population contributed to the vogue of Wagner in the mid-1880s, and declining ticket prices made opera available not only to elites but to the socially aspiring middle class. Opera and the other arts exploded in Chicago in the 1880s. In 1865, Uranus Crosby used his wartime distilling fortune to open Crosby's Opera House, which hosted touring opera companies until it burned down in the Sporadic visits of Italian opera companies predominated through theĮra. Ominously, the house burned down on the second night. A small visiting troupe first brought opera to Rice's Theater in 1850. Like the other arts, opera was slow to develop as a part of Chicago's social and cultural identity.
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