The Bals Publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century

The Bals Publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century
Author :
Publisher : Pendragon Press
Total Pages : 228
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1576470342
ISBN-13 : 9781576470343
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis The Bals Publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century by : Richard Templar Semmens

The range of possibilities for what was termed a ball in eighteenth-century France was quite considerable. At one extreme were the carefully regulated bals parés at the other were the elaborately staged bals masqués. Alternatively, a bal could also be an entirely impromptu affair. Throughout this colorful range of possibilities, the repertoire of dance styles and types was generally shared: danses figures, new as well as old, for couples; and group dances, among which the contredanse reigned supreme.There was another kind of ball, however, that has not yet been examined systematically by scholars. The bals publics held at the opera house in Paris were initiated not long after Louis XIV's death in 1715, and remained popular until the fall of the ancienne régime. This book explores the advent and early development of the bal public through 1763, when a fire destroyed the home of the Académie Royale de Musique (the 'Opera'). The bal public was unlike any other kind of ball, although, as with bals masqués, those in attendance were masked. This study aims, in part, to explore how the bal public might have influenced social dancing more generally. By 1744, there was a dramatic shift in social modeling from the royal balls at Versailles (and elsewhere) to the public balls at the Opera.

Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure

Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 324
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351566797
ISBN-13 : 1351566792
Rating : 4/5 (97 Downloads)

Synopsis Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure by : Melissa Percival

A fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard?s paintings known as the ?figures de fantaisie?, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination reconnects the fantasy figures with neglected visual traditions in European art and firmly situates them within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of eighteenth-century France. Prior scholarship has focused on the paintings? connections with portraiture, whereas this study relocates them within a tradition of fantasy figures, where resemblance was ignored or downplayed. The book defines Fragonard as a painter of the imagination and foregrounds the imaginary at a time when Enlightenment rationalism and Classical aesthetics contrived to delimit the imagination. The book unravels scholarly writing on these Fragonard paintings and examines the history of the fantasy figure from early modern Europe to eighteenth-century France. Emerging from this background is a view of Fragonard turning away from the academically sanctioned ?invention?, towards more playful variants of the imaginary: fantasy and caprice. Melissa Percival demonstrates how fantasy figures engage both artists and viewers, allowing artists to unleash their imagination through displays of virtuosity and viewers to use their imagination to explore the paintings? unusual juxtapositions and humour.

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 505
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107137899
ISBN-13 : 1107137896
Rating : 4/5 (99 Downloads)

Synopsis Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera by : Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.

Uncovering Paris

Uncovering Paris
Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
Total Pages : 354
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780807166352
ISBN-13 : 0807166359
Rating : 4/5 (52 Downloads)

Synopsis Uncovering Paris by : Lela F. Kerley

From 1889 to 1914 nude spectacles increased at an astonishing rate as a result of burgeoning artistic experimentation, the commercialization of the female body, and the rise of urban nightlife. In particular, artists’ balls and music halls provided creative spaces in which women, artists, impresarios, and the illustrated press could cast the natural body as a source of sexual pleasure, identity, and reform. Emphasizing the role of erotic entertainment as an outlet and agent of modern sensibilities, Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque offers a fresh approach to important topics of the period—Bohemian artists, the New Woman, and press censorship—and reinterprets them through the lens of la femme nue. Having inherited her name from the pictorial female Nude and the Nude’s real-life counterpart, the artist’s model, la femme nue operated as a screen onto which various groups projected their artistic drives, sexual desires, monetary interests, and cultural anxieties. A struggle to define pornography and art, freedom and censorship, and public and private spheres ensued among artists, theater directors, and moral leagues as a century-long tradition of equating civilization with clothing broke down in the face of performative challenges. In posing, singing, acting, and dancing in naturalist presentations, the artist’s model-turned-erotic entertainer engendered crises in ways of seeing the female body that contributed to and was indicative of a changing moral climate within which women were accorded more freedom to corporeally express themselves. Once denigrated and denounced as a sign of vulgar working-class sexuality, the revelation of female flesh became an integral aspect of twentieth-century French body culture. Drawing upon a range of colorful commentaries, dramatic debates, and evocative photos, Lela F. Kerley highlights the importance of nudity in the redrawing of moral boundaries as she uncovers key moments that amounted to a “culture war” in the years leading up to World War I. Through an investigation of street riots, court cases, and anti-pornography campaigns, Uncovering Paris offers an interdisciplinary approach to the scholarship on Belle Époque sexual politics and a rich glimpse into the social construction of morality in Belle Époque France.

The Triumph of Pleasure

The Triumph of Pleasure
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 332
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226116389
ISBN-13 : 0226116387
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis The Triumph of Pleasure by : Georgia Cowart

With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 889
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780190944506
ISBN-13 : 0190944501
Rating : 4/5 (06 Downloads)

Synopsis Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg by : Doug Fullington

This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.

Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy

Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 308
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351575164
ISBN-13 : 1351575163
Rating : 4/5 (64 Downloads)

Synopsis Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy by : Michael Talbot

As shown by the ever-increasing volume of recordings, editions and performances of the vast repertory of secular cantatas for solo voice produced, primarily in Italy, in the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, this long neglected genre has at last 'come of age'. However, scholarly interest is currently lagging behind musical practice: incredibly, there has been no general study of the Baroque cantata since Eugen Schmitz's handbook of 1914, and although many academic theses have examined microscopically the cantatas of individual composers, there has been little opportunity to view these against the broader canvas of the genre as a whole. The contributors in this volume choose aspects of the cantata relevant to their special interests in order to say new things about the works, whether historical, analytical, bibliographical, discographical or performance-based. The prime focus is on Italian-born composers working between 1650 and 1750 (thus not Handel), but the opportunity is also taken in one chapter (by Graham Sadler) to compare the French cantata tradition with its Italian parent in association with a startling new claim regarding the intended instrumentation. Many key figures are considered, among them Tomaso Albinoni, Giovanni Bononcini, Giovanni Legrenzi, Benedetto Marcello, Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella, Leonardo Vinci and Antonio Vivaldi. The poetic texts of the cantatas, all too often treated as being of little intrinsic interest, are given their due weight. Space is also found for discussions of the history of Baroque solo cantatas on disc and of the realization of the continuo in cantata arias - a topic more complex and contentious than may at first be apparent. The book aims to stimulate interest in, and to win converts to, this genre, which in its day equalled the instrumental sonata in importance, and in which more than a few composers invested a major part of their creativity.

Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music

Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 294
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317048817
ISBN-13 : 1317048814
Rating : 4/5 (17 Downloads)

Synopsis Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music by : Mary Cyr

Mary Cyr addresses the needs of researchers, performers, and informed listeners who wish to apply knowledge about historically informed performance to specific pieces. Special emphasis is placed upon the period 1680 to 1760, when the viol, violin, and violoncello grew to prominence as solo instruments in France. Part I deals with the historical background to the debate between the French and Italian styles and the features that defined French style. Part II summarizes the present state of research on bowed string instruments (violin, viola, cello, contrebasse, pardessus de viole, and viol) in France, including such topics as the size and distribution of parts in ensembles and the role of the contrebasse. Part III addresses issues and conventions of interpretation such as articulation, tempo and character, inequality, ornamentation, the basse continue, pitch, temperament, and "special effects" such as tremolo and harmonics. Part IV introduces four composer profiles that examine performance issues in the music of Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marin Marais, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and the Forquerays (father and son). The diversity of compositional styles among this group of composers, and the virtuosity they incorporated in their music, generate a broad field for discussing issues of performance practice and offer opportunities to explore controversial themes within the context of specific pieces.

The Oxford Handbook of Opera

The Oxford Handbook of Opera
Author :
Publisher : Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages : 1217
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780195335538
ISBN-13 : 0195335538
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Opera by : Helen M. Greenwald

Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.

The Beggar's Opera and Polly

The Beggar's Opera and Polly
Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Total Pages : 257
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191645754
ISBN-13 : 0191645753
Rating : 4/5 (54 Downloads)

Synopsis The Beggar's Opera and Polly by : John Gay

'Gamesters and Highwaymen are generally very good to their Whores, but they are very Devils to their Wives.' With The Beggar's Opera (1728), John Gay created one of the most enduringly popular works in English theatre history, and invented a new dramatic form, the ballad opera. Gay's daring mixture of caustic political satire, well-loved popular tunes, and a story of crime and betrayal set in the urban underworld of prostitutes and thieves was an overnight sensation. Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum have become famous well beyond the confines of Gay's original play, and in its sequel, Polly, banned in Gay's lifetime, their adventures continue in the West Indies. With a cross-dressing heroine and a cast of female adventurers, pirates, Indian princes, rebel slaves, and rapacious landowners, Polly lays bare a culture in which all human relationships are reduced to commercial transactions. Raucous, lyrical, witty, ironic and tragic by turns, The Beggar's Opera and Polly - published together here for the first time - offer a scathing and ebullient portrait of a society in which statesmen and outlaws, colonialists and pirates, are impossible to tell apart. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.