In music -- unlike painting and literature -- the period is generally associated with Romanticism. Bizet's Carmen is one of the works that challenges that blanket labeling of so long and complex a period A cigarette factory's lunch bell rings, disgorging female workers into the sunlight, who stream over a bridge, all smoking, into the town square Act I Scene 1.
This subject matter contains classic elements of the 19th-century Realist movement. Realism established itself as an anti-Romantic reaction in French painting and literature around the midth century. Its manifesto was the book Realism by novelist and theoretician Champfleury , who claimed that novels should be "daguerreotypes" [an early form of photography invented in the s] of everyday life.
If an e muet occurs in the middle of a line, however, it is counted as a separate syllable unless it is elided into a following vowel sound. Lines of French verse are classified according to the number of syllables they contain. Every line with nine syllables or more is required to have a caesura, or a pause, in the middle of the line. The caesura may never fall on an e muet that is treated as a counted syllable. In an alexandrine a twelve-syllable line , the caesura indicated in the examples in this article by the symbol traditionally falls after the sixth syllable, dividing the line into two half-lines, or hemistichs, of six syllables each.
In other words, if the a rhyme is masculine, the b rhyme will generally be feminine, and vice versa. Since French syllables are only weakly stressed, prosodic accents, or tonic accents, generally default to the end of syntactic units. At the word level, a tonic accent is generally found on the last syllable of a polysyllabic word, or on the penultimate syllable in the case of a word ending with an e muet.
The strongest tonic accent in a line typically falls on the last counted syllable of the line i. In lines of nine syllables or more, the last syllable before the caesura is also accented. Beyond these basic principles, nineteenth-century theorists of French versification differed on whether there were obligatory accents elsewhere in a verse. However, it allows for some flexibility in the placement of secondary prosodic accents, that is, accents other than the obligatory ones falling on the rhyme and where applicable the caesura.
In other words, when French texts are set to music, accented syllables tend to occur at stronger metrical positions than unaccented ones. The empirical evidence thus suggests that composers were sensitive to the placement of accented syllables. Example 1. This is reproduced in Example 1. Is it in Turkey? In Arabia? I have annotated the text using a convention adapted from Andreas Giger and used throughout this article.
Accented syllables are bolded and underlined, and parenthetical Arabic numerals after lines of verse refer to the position of accented syllables within the lines. In a declamation of the lines from Le huron shown above, a customary tonic accent would appear on the rhyming syllables on the last counted syllable of each line , and a secondary accent would appear on the fourth syllable of each line, marking the end of a syntactic unit, or word group.
In , Reicha published a treatise on the art of operatic composition entitled Art du compositeur dramatique, ou Cours complet de composition vocale.
Reflecting the importance that Reicha assigned to text setting, the first section of the treatise is devoted to prosody and its relationship to music. The strongest accents, such as the tonic accent at the end of a multi-syllable word, a hemistich, or a line of verse, should be placed on a downbeat, or on the third beat if the setting is in quadruple meter.
In addition, syllables that immediately precede a tonic accent or logical accent are generally treated as weak, even though they could be treated as strong in other contexts. Each of the prosodic accents annotated in the text above falls on a notated downbeat, and the variations in accentual patterns in each of the four hemistichs are scrupulously observed. In addition to receiving metrical emphasis, the accented syllables in Example 2 are further reinforced by longer note values. Example 2.
Example 3. Thomas, Hamlet , Act I, Duo. Thomas is faithful to the fluid prosodic rhythms of the text. Particles that are syntactically weak e. In each of these examples, prosodic accents are consistently aligned with metrical accents in the music. Example 4. This romance was popular enough in its day to provide Beethoven with the theme for a set of piano variations written around The lines imply the following accents:.
In the opera, Richard the Lionheart has been held captive in Austria on his way back from the Crusades. His faithful retainer Blondel the minstrel has been searching for him all over Europe. Richard recognizes the tune as his own composition and responds to Blondel, and together they plan for a rescue. The matter of fitting the verses to the strait-jacket of a fixed fredon [tune] was a prosodic problem which the poets solved in their own way.
To begin with, the matter of false accents was one which apparently caused them no qualms whatever. When necessary they placed weak syllables on strong beats or long notes with such insouciance that in reading the plays one very soon ceases to notice such places at all. Example 5. Example 5c is a transcription that combines the text and melody. Vaudeville melodies like Example 5 b were typically sung in the carnival atmosphere of the Parisian street fairs and were generally folklike and catchy, often featuring steady, dance-related rhythms Isherwood , —99; Grout , Table 1.
Example 6. Example 7. Italian verse is therefore much more congenial to the simplified singsong rhythms of music written in a popular style. In the third and fourth lines of Example 7, for instance, the internal prosodic accents shift from the second to the third syllable.
Composers setting French texts with shifting accents were faced with the choices set forth in Table 1. Example 8. Unlike in the opening pair of verses in Example 7, however, the paired verses in Example 8 do not feature the same recurring accentual patterns:. Auber nevertheless sets them to the same musical rhythms. The popular style adopted by Masaniello in this number also marks him as a man of the people, an important theme in an opera that deals with a revolutionary uprising.
Depending on the actual placement of prosodic accents in the French verses, the resultant musical declamation may be unobjectionable as in Example 7 , but it may also be artificial or perverse as in Examples 4, 5, and 8.
Figure 1. The two concepts simply have nothing to do with each other:. Toward this end, they developed recitative, a type of sung speech featuring the solo voice and an unadorned vocal line expressive of the text. Early operas, largely based on mythological themes and peopled with noble characters, promoted aristocratic ideals. 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.
The audiences for court performances were part of the spectacle, since the convention of darkening the theater did not yet exist. Today the word libretto denotes the text of the opera, the drama that is set to music, but in the days of court opera, librettos were attractively illustrated and therefore involved the talents of draftsmen and engravers , who were also engaged to commemorate the festivities.
Although the spectacular emphasis of court performances continued as opera evolved, musical considerations guided its evolution.
It was early noticed that music could express mood, define character, and enliven dramatic situations, sometimes more eloquently than verbal expression alone. Arias for solo voice might express a sentiment both musically and verbally; ensembles, choruses, and orchestral interludes likewise produced effective color. Although Monteverdi spent the early part of his career writing for the dukes of Mantua, his last works were intended for the public opera houses of Venice, the first of which opened in The public became and still remains the primary audience for the opera, although court productions continued to be devised wherever courts existed.
Opera in the Age of Enlightenment By the end of the eighteenth century, opera was an international phenomenon, and both comic and serious genres flourished in France, England, and the Habsburg empire as well as in Italy, although Italian remained the standard language of the libretto.
Decorative objects of the period suggest the popularity of opera outside a court context Under composers such as Jean-Philippe Rameau — and Georg Frideric Handel — , the orchestra expanded to include woodwind instruments, horns, and drums in addition to the original strings.
The magnificently ornamented music written for such virtuoso singers thrilled audiences but also diminished the dramatic element of opera and provoked calls for reform. These were answered by Christoph Willibald von Gluck — , whose Orfeo ed Euridice of recasts the time-honored operatic story of the artist whose song can thwart death itself. The reinvigoration of opera at the end of the eighteenth century was assured by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — , whose music for voices and orchestra is alive with dramatic purpose.
The extremely effective libretto for this opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte — , was based on a contemporary French play by Beaumarchais. Don Giovanni , another collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte, presents the last days of an unrepentant seducer and culminates in two unforgettable scenes in which the statue of a man whom he has murdered accepts an invitation to dinner and arrives to escort him to hell.
The Flourishing of Opera in the Nineteenth Century In the nineteenth century, conditions were ripe for broadening the audience for opera and for changes in the form itself. Bourgeois taste displaced court concerns in the selection of dramatic subjects, while composers, singers, and theater impresarios vied for popular success. More often than not they ended up as manual laborers, although a minority did enter the service sector.
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