Verdi and the French Aesthetic - Verse, Stanza and Melody in XIX Century Opera.pdf - Opera Music Ebook Collection (Art Ebooks) - Babooshka

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Verdi and the French Aesthetic

Verse, stanza, and melody in nineteenth-century opera

Focusing on Verdi’s French operas, Andreas Giger shows how the com-

poser acquired an ever better understanding of the various approaches

to French versiﬁcation while gradually bringing his works in line with

French melodic aesthetic. In his ﬁrst French opera, Jerusalem ,Verdi

treated the text in an overly cautious manner, trying to avoid prosodic

mistakes; in Les Vepres siciliennes ,hebegantoapplymorefreedom,

scanning the verses against some prosodic accents to convey the light-

heartedness of a melody; and in Don Carlos , he ﬁnally drew on the entire

palette of prosodic interpretations. Most of Verdi’s melodic accom-

plishments in the French operas carried over into the subsequent Italian

ones and set the stage for what later would be called operatic verismo.

Drawing attention to the signiﬁcance of the operatic libretto for the

stylistic and dramatic development of nineteenth-century French and

Italian opera, this book illustrates Verdi’s gradual mastery of the chal-

lenges he faced and their historical signiﬁcance.

andreas giger is Associate Professor of Music at Louisiana State Uni-

versity. His research interests have concentrated on nineteenth-century

Italian opera and the work of Leonard Bernstein. He is the author of

Verismo (2004) in the Handworterbuch der musikalischen Terminolo-

gie and articles in many books and journals, including The Cambridge

Companion to Verdi , the Journal of the American Musicological Society ,

and the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musi-

cians . He is also coeditor of Music in the Mirror (2002) and founder of

the Internet database saggi musicali italiani .

Ve rdi and the French Aesthetic

Ve rse, stanza, and melody in nineteenth-century opera

andreas giger

Louisiana State University

Verdi and the French Aesthetic - Verse, Stanza and Melody in XIX Century Opera.pdf