1.
Tenor
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Tenor is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range is one of the highest of the male voice types. The tenors vocal range lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, and A4, the A above middle C, in solo work, this range extends up to C5, or tenor high C. The low extreme for tenors is roughly A♭2, at the highest extreme, some tenors can sing up to two Fs above middle C. The tenor voice type is divided into the leggero tenor, lyric tenor, spinto tenor, dramatic tenor, heldentenor. The name tenor derives from the Latin word tenere, which means to hold, in medieval and Renaissance polyphony between about 1250 and 1500, the tenor was the structurally fundamental voice, vocal or instrumental. All other voices were normally calculated in relation to the tenor, until the late 16th century introduction of the contratenor singers, the tenor was usually the highest voice, assuming the role of providing a foundation. It was also in the 18th century that tenor came to signify the male voice that sang such parts, thus, for earlier repertoire, a line marked tenor indicated the parts role, and not the required voice type. Indeed, even as late as the century, partbooks labelled tenor might contain parts for a range of voice types. The vocal range of the tenor is one of the highest of the voice types. Within opera, the lowest note in the tenor repertoire is probably A♭2 in Rossinis rarely performed La donna del lago in the role of Rodrigo di Dhu. Within more frequently performed repertoire, Mime and Herod both call for an A2, a few tenor roles in the standard repertoire call for a tenor C. Some of the few top Cs in the operatic repertoire are either optional or interpolated by tradition. However, the highest demanded note in the standard operatic repertoire is D5. Some operatic roles for tenors require a darker timbre and fewer high notes, in the leggero repertoire, the highest note is F5, therefore, very few tenors can, given the raising of concert pitch since its composition, have this role in their repertoire without transposition. Within the tenor voice type category are seven generally recognized subcategories, leggero tenor, lyric tenor, spinto tenor, dramatic tenor, heldentenor, Mozart tenor, Also known as the tenore di grazia, the leggero tenor is essentially the male equivalent of a lyric coloratura. This voice is light, agile, and capable of executing difficult passages of fioritura, the typical leggero tenor possesses a range spanning from approximately C3 to E♭5, with a few being able to sing up to F5 or higher in full voice. In some cases, the chest register of the leggero tenor may extend below C3, voices of this type are utilized frequently in the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and in music dating from the Baroque period. Leggero tenor roles in operas, The lyric tenor is a warm voice with a bright, full timbre that is strong but not heavy
2.
French opera
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French opera is one of Europes most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy, Poulenc and Messiaen. Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition as well, including Lully, Gluck, Salieri, Cherubini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Lully and his librettist Quinault created tragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lullys most important successor was Rameau, after Rameaus death, the German Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France, opéra comique, by the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for the operas of Rossini. Rossinis Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of Grand opera, lighter opéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber and others. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing, berliozs epic masterpiece Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years after it was written. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition, perhaps the most interesting response to Wagnerian influence was Claude Debussys unique operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande. Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen, the first operas to be staged in France were imported from Italy, beginning with Francesco Sacratis La finta pazza in 1645. French audiences gave them a lukewarm reception, when two Italian operas, Francesco Cavallis Xerse and Ercole amante, proved failures in Paris in 1660 and 1662, the prospects of opera flourishing in France looked remote. In 1669, Pierre Perrin founded the Académie dOpéra and, in collaboration with the composer Robert Cambert and their first effort, Pomone, appeared on stage on 3 March 1671 and was followed a year later by Les peines et plaisirs de lamour. At this point King Louis XIV transferred the privilege of producing operas from Perrin to Jean-Baptiste Lully, Lully, a Florentine, was already the favourite musician of the king, who had assumed full royal powers in 1661 and was intent on refashioning French culture in his image. Lully had an instinct for knowing exactly what would satisfy the taste of his master. He had already composed music for extravagant court entertainments as well as for the theatre, yet Molière and Lully had quarrelled bitterly and the composer found a new and more pliable collaborator in Philippe Quinault, who would write the libretti for all but two of Lullys operas. On 27 April 1673, Lullys Cadmus et Hermione – often regarded as the first French opera in the sense of the term – appeared in Paris. It was a work in a new genre, which its creators Lully and Quinault baptised tragédie en musique, a form of opera specially adapted for French taste. Lully went on to produce tragédies en musique at the rate of at least one a year until his death in 1687, as the name suggests, tragédie en musique was modelled on the French Classical tragedy of Corneille and Racine. Lully and Quinault replaced the confusingly elaborate Baroque plots favoured by the Italians with a much clearer five-act structure, each of the five acts generally followed a regular pattern
3.
Travesti (theatre)
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Not to be confused with the South American gender identity term, Travesti. Travesti is a term referring to the portrayal of a character in an opera, play. Some sources regard travesti as an Italian term, some as French, depending on sources, the term may be given as travesty, travesti, or en travesti. Similarly, in the popular genre of Victorian burlesque, there were usually one or more breeches roles. As a boy player, Alexander Cooke is thought to have created many of Shakespeares principal female roles, as well as Agrippina in Ben Jonsons Sejanus His Fall. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, women began to appear on the English stage, although some female roles continued to be played by boys and young men, including romantic leads. Edward Kynaston, whose roles included the role in Ben Jonsons Epicoene and Evadne in Beaumont. Londons Shakespeares Globe theatre, a reconstruction of the original Globe Theatre. Toby Cockerell played Katherine of France in the opening production of Henry V in 1997, while Mark Rylance played Cleopatra in the 1999 production of Antony. Travesti roles for men are still to be found in British pantomime, where there is at least one female character traditionally played by a male actor. Castrati, adult males with a singing voice, appeared in the earliest operas – initially in female roles. In the first performance of Monteverdis Orfeo in 1607 the roles of Eurydice, however, by 1680 the castrati had become the predominant singers for leading male roles as well. The use of castrati for both male and female roles was particularly strong in the Papal states, where women were forbidden from public performances until the 19th century. An exception to this practice was in 17th and 18th century French opera where it was traditional to use uncastrated male voices both for the hero and for malevolent female divinities and spirits. In Lullys 1686 opera Armide the hero was sung by a haute-contre while the spirit of hatred was sung by a tenor. In Rameaus 1733 Hippolyte et Aricie, the hero was sung by an haute-contre, the remaining female roles in both operas were sung by women. The title role of the vain but ugly marsh nymph in Rameaus Platée is also for an haute-contre, Female roles in opera sung by men can still be found, although they are not common. Azio Corghis 2005 opera Il dissoluto assolto, which incorporates elements from Mozarts Don Giovanni
4.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
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Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time. He was almost 50 before he embarked on the career on which his reputation chiefly rests today. His debut, Hippolyte et Aricie, caused a stir and was fiercely attacked by the supporters of Lullys style of music for its revolutionary use of harmony. Rameaus music had gone out of fashion by the end of the 18th century, today, he enjoys renewed appreciation with performances and recordings of his music ever more frequent. The details of Rameaus life are obscure, especially concerning his first forty years. He was a man, and even his wife knew nothing of his early life. Rameaus early years are particularly obscure and he was born on 25 September 1683 in Dijon, and baptised the same day. His father, Jean, worked as an organist in churches around Dijon. The couple had children, of whom Jean-Philippe was the seventh. Rameau was taught music before he could read or write and he was educated at the Jesuit college at Godrans, but he was not a good pupil and disrupted classes with his singing, later claiming that his passion for opera had begun at the age of twelve. Initially intended for the law, Rameau decided he wanted to be a musician, and his father sent him to Italy, on his return, he worked as a violinist in travelling companies and then as an organist in provincial cathedrals before moving to Paris for the first time. Here, in 1706, he published his earliest known compositions, the works that make up his first book of Pièces de clavecin. In 1709, he moved back to Dijon to take over his fathers job as organist in the main church, the contract was for six years, but Rameau left before then and took up similar posts in Lyon and Clermont. During this period, he composed motets for church performance as well as secular cantatas, in 1722, he returned to Paris for good, and here he published his most important work of music theory, Traité de lharmonie. This soon won him a reputation, and it was followed in 1726 by his Nouveau système de musique théorique. In 1724 and 1729, he published two more collections of harpsichord pieces. Rameau took his first tentative steps into composing music when the writer Alexis Piron asked him to provide songs for his popular comic plays written for the Paris Fairs
5.
Jean-Baptiste Lully
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Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian-born French composer, instrumentalist, and dancer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered a master of the French baroque style, Lully disavowed any Italian influence in French music of the period. He became a French subject in 1661, Lully was born on November 28,1632 in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to a family of millers. His general education and his training during his youth in Florence remain uncertain. He used to say that a Franciscan friar gave him his first music lessons and he also learned to play the violin. Guise took the boy to Paris, where the fourteen-year-old entered Mademoiselles service and he probably honed his musical skills by working with Mademoiselles household musicians and with composers Nicolas Métru, François Roberday and Nicolas Gigault. The teenagers talents as a guitarist, violinist, and dancer quickly won him the nicknames Baptiste, when Mademoiselle was exiled to the provinces in 1652 after the rebellion known as the Fronde, Lully begged his leave. Because he did not want to live in the country, by February 1653 Lully had attracted the attention of young Louis XIV, dancing with him in the Ballet royal de la nuit. By March 16,1653, Lully had been made royal composer for instrumental music and his vocal and instrumental music for court ballets gradually made him indispensable. In 1660 and 1662 he collaborated on performances of Francesco Cavallis Xerse. When Louis XIV took over the reins of government in 1661, in December 1661 the Florentine was granted letters of naturalization. The latter assertion was an untruth, from 1661 on, the trios and dances he wrote for the court were promptly published. When he became surintendant de la de la chambre du roi in 1661. He relied mainly on the Little Violins for court ballets and their collaboration began in earnest in 1664 with Le Mariage forcé. In 1672 Lully broke with Molière, who turned to Marc-Antoine Charpentier, having acquired Pierre Perrins opera privilege, Lully became the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, that is, the royal opera, which performed in the Palais-Royal. Between 1673 and 1687 he produced a new opera almost yearly and fiercely protected his monopoly over that new genre, after Queen Marie-Thérèses death in 1683 and the kings secret marriage to Mme de Maintenon, devotion came to the fore at court. The kings enthusiasm for opera dissipated, he was revolted by Lullys dissolute life, in 1686, to show his displeasure, Louis XIV made a point of not inviting Lully to perform Armide at Versailles. Lully died from gangrene, having struck his foot with his conducting staff during a performance of his Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIVs recovery from surgery
6.
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
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Marc-Antoine Charpentier was a French composer of the Baroque era. Exceptionally prolific and versatile, Charpentier produced compositions of the highest quality in several genres and his mastery in writing sacred vocal music, above all, was recognized and hailed by his contemporaries. Any family relationship between him and Gustave Charpentier, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French opera composer, is highly unlikely, Charpentier was born in or near Paris, the son of a master scribe who had very good connections to influential families in the Parlement of Paris. Marc-Antoine received a good education, perhaps with the help of the Jesuits. He spent two or three years in Rome, probably between 1667 and 1669, and studied with Giacomo Carissimi and he is also known to have been in contact with poet-musician Charles Coypeau dAssoucy, who was composing for the French Embassy in Rome. A legend claims that Charpentier initially traveled to Rome to study painting before he was discovered by Carissimi, regardless, he acquired a solid knowledge of contemporary Italian musical practice and brought it back to France. Immediately on his return to France, Charpentier probably began working as composer to Marie de Lorraine, duchesse de Guise. Throughout the 1670s, the bulk of works were for trios. Then, about 1680, Mlle de Guise increased the size of the ensemble, until it included 13 performers, in the pieces written from 1684 until late 1687, the names of the Guise musicians appear as marginalia in Charpentiers manuscripts – including Charp beside the haute-contre line. Étienne Loulié, the senior instrumentalist who played keyboard, recorder and viole, despite what is often asserted, during his seventeen years in the service of Mlle de Guise, Charpentier was not the director of the Guise ensemble. The director was a gentleman of Mlle de Guises court, a musician, Italophile. During his years of service to Mlle de Guise, Charpentier also composed for Mme de Guise and it was in large part owing to Mme de Guises protection that the Guise musicians were permitted to perform Charpentiers chamber operas in defiance of the monopoly held by Jean Baptiste Lully. By late 1687, Mlle de Guise was dying, around that time, Charpentier entered the employ of the Jesuits. Indeed, he is not named in the princesss will of March 1688, nor in the papers of her estate, during his seventeen-odd years at the Hôtel de Guise, Charpentier had written almost as many pages of music for outside commissions as he had for Mlle de Guise. For example, after Molières falling out with Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672, after Molières death in 1673, Charpentier continued to write for the playwrights successors, Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé. Play after play, he would compose pieces that demanded more musicians than the number authorized by Lullys monopoly over theatrical music, by 1685, the troop ceased flouting these restrictions. Their capitulation ended Charpentiers career as a composer for the spoken theater, in 1679, Charpentier had been singled out to compose for Louis XIVs son, the Dauphin. In short, an ensemble that, with Mlle de Guises permission, by early 1683, when he was awarded a royal pension, Charpentier was being commissioned to write for court events such as the annual Corpus Christi procession
7.
Christoph Willibald Gluck
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Christoph Willibald Gluck was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. With a series of new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste. The strong influence of French opera in these works encouraged Gluck to move to Paris, fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French national genre into a new synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stages. One of the last of these, Iphigénie en Tauride, was a success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest work. Gluck was born on 2 July 1714 in Erasbach near Neumarkt and his father Alexander was a forester in Erasbach, and after 1717 head forester in Reichstadt, Kreibitz and Eisenberg, all in northern Bohemia. According to some biographers, it was here, in the middle of Lusatian Mountains, in 1727 the family moved to Eisenberg, where his father was admitted to the service of Prince Philip Hyazinth von Lobkowitz. The Alsatian painter Johann Christian von Mannlich says it was as a Bohemian schoolboy that Gluck received his first musical training. Mannlich relates in his memoirs, written in French and published in 1810 and he quotes Gluck as saying, My father was forestmaster at M. in Bohemia and he planned that eventually I should succeed him. In my homeland everyone is musical, music is taught in the schools, as I was passionate about the art, I made rapid progress. I played several instruments and the schoolmaster, singling me out from the other pupils, I no longer thought and dreamt of anything but music, the art of forestry was neglected. Most now claim that the object of Glucks travels was not Vienna but Prague, at the time the University of Prague boasted a flourishing musical scene that included performances of both Italian opera and oratorio. Gluck eventually left Prague without taking a degree, and vanishes from the record until 1737. According to the music historian Daniel Heartz, there has been considerable controversy concerning Glucks native language, Glucks first biographer, Anton Schmid, accepted that Gluck spoke Czech, but thought Salieri incorrect, proposing instead that Gluck learned Czech in Prague. Heartz writes, More devious manoeuvres have been attempted by Glucks German biographers of this century, while the French ones have, without exception, hans Joachim Moser wanted a lyric work in Czech as proof. In fact, the music theorist Larent Garcin, writing in 1770 before Gluck arrived in Paris, in 1737 Gluck arrived in Milan, where he studied under G. B. Sammartini, who, according to Carpani, taught Gluck practical knowledge of all the instruments, apparently this relationship lasted for several years. Set to a libretto by Metastasio, the opera opened the Milanese Carnival of 1742, according to one anecdote, the public would not accept Glucks style until he inserted an aria in the lighter Milanese manner for contrast. Nearly all of his operas in this period were, like Artaserse, set to Metastasios texts, in 1745 Gluck accepted an invitation to become house composer at Londons Kings Theatre, probably travelling to England via Frankfurt and in the company of Georg Christian, Fürst von Lobkowitz
8.
Paris Opera
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The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of France. Classical ballet as we know it today arose within the Paris Opera as the Paris Opera Ballet and has remained an integral, small scale and contemporary works are also staged in the 500-seat Amphitheatre under the Opéra Bastille. The companys annual budget is in the order of 200 million euros, with this money, the company runs the two houses and supports a large permanent staff, which includes the orchestra of 170, a chorus of 110 and the corps de ballet of 150. Each year, the Opéra presents about 380 performances of opera, ballet and other concerts, to an audience of about 800,000 people. In the 2012/13 season, the Opéra presented 18 opera titles,13 ballets,5 symphonic concerts, the companys training bodies are also active, with 7 concerts from the Atelier Lyrique and 4 programmes from the École de Danse. The poet Pierre Perrin began thinking and writing about the possibility of French opera in 1655 and he believed that the prevailing opinion of the time that the French language was fundamentally unmusical was completely incorrect. Seventeenth-century France offered Perrin essentially two types of organization for realizing his vision, an academy or a public theater. On 28 June 1669, Louis XIV signed the Privilège accordé au Sieur Perrin pour létablissement dune Académie dOpéra en musique and he was free to select business partners of his choice and to set the price of tickets. No one was to have the right of free entry including members of the royal court, although it was to be a public theatre, it retained its status as royal academy in which the authority of the king as the primary stakeholder was decisive. The monopoly, originally intended to protect the enterprise from competition during its phase, was renewed for subsequent recipients of the privilege up to the early French Revolution. As Victoria Johnson points out, the Opera was an organization by nature so luxurious and expensive in its productions that its survival depended on financial protection. His first opera Pomone with music by Robert Cambert opened on 3 March 1671, a second work, Les peines et les plaisirs de lamour, with a libretto by Gabriel Gilbert and music by Cambert, was performed in 1672. The institution was renamed the Académie Royale de Musique and came to be known in France simply as the Opéra. Because of legal difficulties Lully could not use the Salle de la Bouteille, during Lullys tenure, the only works performed were his own. The first productions were the pastorale Les fêtes de lAmour et de Bacchus, Lully greatly desired a better theatre and persuaded the king to let him use the one at the Palais-Royal free of charge. The Théâtre du Palais-Royal had been altered in 1660 and 1671, the first production in the new theatre was Alceste on 19 January 1674. The opera was bitterly attacked by those enraged at the restrictions that Lully had caused to be placed on the French, to mitigate the damage, Louis XIV arranged for new works to be premiered at the court, usually at the Chateau Vieux of the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This had the advantage of subsidizing the cost of rehearsals, as well as most of the machinery, sets, and costumes
