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From the very first opera performance in Italy in 1607, to the origins of some of the world’s most recognisable music, and modern day experimental productions, we’ll share a timeline of how opera has changed over the last 400 years.
Its origins can be traced back to the late 16th century in Italy, where it quickly gained popularity and spread to other European countries. Since then, opera has evolved and undergone many changes, adapting to the cultural and musical trends of the times.
Take a quick journey through the long and fascinating history of opera with this timeline of defining moments.
Although music and drama were the essential features of opera, visual effects often dominated the court productions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the designers of sets and theatrical machinery sometimes received greater acclaim than the composers who wrote the music.
Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde, through its revolutionary absence of traditional tonality and its novel use of musical colour, changes people’s expectations and paves the way for modernist opera such as Alban Berg’s 1925 work Wozzeck.
Classicism was manifested in the balance and serenity of composition, the search for formal beauty, for perfection, in harmonious and inspiring forms of high values. It sought the creation of a universal musical language, a harmonization between form and musical content.
5 lis 2014 · The central issue of the chapter is the need for historians to find ways to address opera’s “complete history,” including the interrelationships of composition, performance, and revisions when writing a historical narrative for opera.
