Words from operas

Freedom to choose his own subjects, and had more time to develop them according to his own ideas. In the years 1849 to 1859 he wrote eight new operas, compared with fourteen in the previous ten years.Verdi's three last major works continued to show new development in conveying drama and emotion. The first to appear, in 1874 was his Requiem, scored for operatic forces but by no means an "opera in ecclesiastical dress" (the words in which Hans von Bülow condemned it before even hearing it). Although in the Requiem Verdi puts to use many of the techniques he learned in opera, its musical forms and emotions are not those of the stage.[172] Verdi's tone painting at the opening of the Requiem is vividly described by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, writing in 1941: "in [the words] murmured by an invisible crowd over the slow swaying of a few simple chords, you straightaway sense the fear and sadness of a vast multitude before the mystery of death. In the [following] Et lux perpetuum the melody spreads it wings...before falling back on itself...you hear a sigh for consolation and eternal peace."By the time Otello premièred in 1887, more than 15 years after Aida, the operas of Verdi's (predeceased) contemporary Richard Wagner had begun their ascendancy in popular taste, and many sought or identified Wagnerian aspects in Verdi's latest composition.[174] Budden points out that there is little in the music of Otello that relates either to the verismo opera of the younger Italian composers, and little if anything which can be construed as a homage to the New German School.[175] Nonetheless there is still much originality, building on the strengths which Verdi had already demonstrated; the powerful storm which opens the opera in medias res, the recollection of the love duet of Act I in Otello's dying words (more an aspect of tinta than leitmotif), imaginative touches of harmony in Iago's "Ero la notte" (Act II).[176]Finally, six years later, appeared Falstaff, Verdi's only comedy apart from the early, ill-fated Un giorno di regno. In this work Roger Parker writes that: "the listener

German, Johann Adolph Hasse, composed among his operas, numbering at least a hundred, one entitled 'Artaxerxes,' two airs from which were sung by Carlo Broschi every evening for ten years to soothe King Philip V. of Spain;—you will realize that opera existed, and even flourished before Gluck produced his 'Orpheus and Eurydice.'...Indeed, throughout the history of opera, there have been recurring periods, when it has become necessary for composers with the true interest of the lyric stage at heart, to restore the proper balance between the creator of a work and its interpreters, in other words to prevent opera from degenerating from a musical drama of truly dramatic significance to a mere framework for the display of vocal pyrotechnics. ...It is then that Orpheus intones the lament, 'Che farò senza Euridice' (I have lost my Eurydice), that air in the score which has truly become immortal and by which Gluck, when the opera as a whole shall have disappeared from the stage, will still be remembered.About Gustav Kobbé, the Author: Gustav Kobbé (4 March 1857 - 27 July 1918) was an American music critic and author, best known for his guide to the operas, The Complete Opera Book, first published (posthumously) in the United States in 1919 and the United Kingdom in 1922....6 His hobby was sailing, and it was while he was out in the Great South Bay off Bay Shore, New York, in July 1918, that a seaplane, coming down for a landing, struck his boat and killed

Another German, Johann Adolph Hasse, composed among his operas, numbering at least a hundred, one entitled 'Artaxerxes,' two airs from which were sung by Carlo Broschi every evening for ten years to soothe King Philip V. of Spain;—you will realize that opera existed, and even flourished before Gluck produced his 'Orpheus and Eurydice.'...Indeed, throughout the history of opera, there have been recurring periods, when it has become necessary for composers with the true interest of the lyric stage at heart, to restore the proper balance between the creator of a work and its interpreters, in other words to prevent opera from degenerating from a musical drama of truly dramatic significance to a mere framework for the display of vocal pyrotechnics. ...It is then that Orpheus intones the lament, 'Che farò senza Euridice' (I have lost my Eurydice), that air in the score which has truly become immortal and by which Gluck, when the opera as a whole shall have disappeared from the stage, will still be remembered.About Gustav Kobbé, the Author: Gustav Kobbé (4 March 1857 - 27 July 1918) was an American music critic and author, best known for his guide to the operas, The Complete Opera Book, first published (posthumously) in the United States in 1919 and the United Kingdom in 1922....6 His hobby was sailing, and it was while he was out in the Great South Bay off Bay Shore, New York, in July 1918, that a seaplane, coming down for a landing, struck his boat and