Tim Carter

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

From the birth of the sound film, the musical has been one of Hollywood’s most important genres. Until the late 1960s it was almost consistently popular, and while the period from 1970 to 2000 saw a drastic reduction in the number of musicals being made, in the new millennium it enjoyed a renaissance that has continued to this day. The Oxford Handb...

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be stu...

Euridice had a poetic text by Ottavio Rinuccini, and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini; its performers included Florentine singers plus others from Mantua and Rome; and its sponsor, Jacopo Corsi, was one of the four instrumentalists who provided the accompaniment. Although it is the “first” opera to have survived complete, it has tended to be...

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be stu...

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be stu...

The marriage of Maria de’ Medici and King Henri IV in October 1600 was a triumph of Florentine diplomacy celebrated by a range of entertainments. Some were provided by the Medici, and others by young patricians such as Jacopo Corsi to gain their favor. They also used the occasion to display a novel form of musical theatre recently developed in Flor...

The stage and sets for Euridice were designed by the Florentine artist Lodovico Cardi, called “Il Cigoli.” His invoice survives, as do an inventory of their elements made when they were disassembled and put into storage, and a list of materials provided by the mattress maker, Francesco Ricoveri. These documents are remarkably precise, even with mea...

Cigoli’s sets for Euridice continued to be used in the Sala delle Commedie in the Palazzo Pitti, although by 1608 they were being replaced by a more complex stage and scenery intended for different kinds of entertainments (often involving dancing) that were better suited to princely tastes. Opera briefly gained a stronger foothold in different spac...

A striking amount of material survives to document the creation of what became known as Oklahoma! —including Hammerstein’s sketches and drafts for the libretto (first completed in November 1942), his subsequent work on the lyrics for the songs, and Rodgers’s music manuscripts. These sources reveal how they worked both together and separately in par...

The first operas were often associated with princely wedding festivities, such as Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (Florence, 1600) or Claudio Monteverdi’s Arianna (Mantua, 1608). They formed part of a series of indoor and outdoor entertainments which, in turn, might plausibly be compared with the fresco cycles often commissioned to mark such nuptials. This...

Monteverdi's Ilsesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1614) is often viewed as an outlier in his secular output. His Fourth and Fifth Books (1603,1605) were firmly embroiled in the controversy with Artusi over the seconda pratica, while his Seventh (1619) sees him shifting style in favor of the new trends that were starting to dominate music in ea...

The Oxford Handbook of Opera offers a series of trenchant essays on the most important and compelling issues confronting those who think and write about opera. The handbook emphasizes not only operas themselves, but such broad concerns of the discipline as genre, voice, national style, performance, censorship, staging, film, editions, and aesthetic...

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical , by Todd Decker. Broadway Legacies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xv, 309 pp. When the not-yet-venerable drama critic of the New York Times , Brooks Atkinson, proclaimed on February 20, 1927, that “Negro plays are in the wind just now,” he had a strong degree of insider knowl...

By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the typical Metastasian two-stanza aria text could be set to music in one of two ways: in the ternary form typical of the earlier da capo aria (stanzas 1–2–1) or in a binary one (stanzas 1–2–1–2). Why did Mozart choose one form over the other in Idomeneo (1781); what does this tell us about the role of...

The numerous documents associated with the controversy launched in 1600 by the Bolognese music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi (1546–1613) against the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) have been well studied by scholars. But no one has yet engaged with the encomia included in the front and back matter of the printed books lying at the hear...

In 1985, Albi Rosenthal reported his discovery of a printed libretto for the opera Andromeda, composed by Monteverdi for performance in Mantua in Carnival 1620. This libretto deserves a new examination for its dramatic content, its likely musical setting (now lost) and some fundamental questions of genre. Its patron, Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, used t...

Claudio Monteverdi's Il quarto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1603) ends with a setting of ‘Piagn’e sospira: e quand’i caldi raggi’, a text from Tasso's Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). Nicea, a Muslim in love with a Christian, wanders through the forest carving her beloved's name in the trees, and weeps as she re‐reads what she has scored in the...

When Claudio Monteverdi was commissioned by Alessandro Striggio in December 1616 to set to music a theatrical text by Scipione Agnelli, Le nozze di Tetide, the composer made trenchant criticisms of it on the grounds of its problematic staging, its unmusical qualities and its failure to rise to the dramatic level of his operas Orfeo (1607) and Arian...

In summer 1937, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) commissioned from playwright Paul Green and composer Kurt Weill a work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Green had provided the text for Weill's first American musical play, Johnny Johnson (1936), which the FTP took up with some enthusiasm, and he had score...

Dr. Johnson's oft-quoted description of eighteenth-century Italian opera as "an exotic and irrational entertainment" was just a throwaway remark in his Life of Hughes, one of his biographical sketches of English poets written between 1777 and 1781. For his famous dictionary, Johnson instead borrowed the more reasonable definition of the genre from...

It says something for recent scholarship on the Broadway musical that the genre now has ‘landmarks’ that can fairly be inserted into the Western art tradition: Nigel Simeone’s new study of West Side Story (1957) sits in a series of books on works by the likes of Andriessen, Birtwistle, Messiaen, and Shostakovich. Of course, the Broadway repertory h...

Although we know some of the circumstances surrounding the first performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo on 24 February 1607, many aspects of its production remain obscure. It is also unclear why two separate printed editions of the libretto should have been issued in 1607, and why publication of the musical score was delayed until August 1609. Nor has i...

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and is today performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. This book offers a fully documented history of the making of this celebrated American musical, drawing on research from rare theater archives, manuscripts, journalism, and other sour...

Monteverdi's music might seem to be relatively straightforward in terms of its surviving sources, given that the vast majority of it seems to have been printed during his lifetime. The main exceptions are the late Venetian operas surviving in manuscript, for reasons that will become clear. However, scholars have tended to assume that once print bec...

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Early Music 33.2 (2005) 351-352 Monteverdi has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years, with a number of important new the duets—path-breaking though they may have been—he can lose sight of the larger-scale progression. Some would blame this on the composer succumbing to a newly declining poetic aesthetic, in particular, by way o...

A close examination of Monteverdi's problematic settings of two texts, "Zefiro torna, e di soavi accenti" (1632) and "Su, su, su pastorelli vezzosi" (1638, 1651), raises significant issues concerning his poetic sensitivities and also the status of his literary and musical sources. This further calls into question the modern reception of his agenda...

This discussion seeks to provide a context for the emergence of so-called ‘urban musicology’, both within nineteenth-century antiquarian endeavour and in response to scholarly trends in the 1970s and 1980s. The strengths, weaknesses and possible future directions of ‘urban musicology’ are also identified.

Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Renaissance Mantua. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. ISBN 0 19 816271 5

Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Renaissance Mantua. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. ISBN 0 19 816271 5

Oxford Readings in Feminism Series Editors: Teresa Brennan and Susan James Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen repre...

There is a convenient fiction maintained by all but the most fervent postmodernist concerning the interpretation of opera: that the music somehow reveals how a particular drama should be played out on the stage. Whether a reading (or a production) is supposedly authentic, traditional or modernist in intent and delivery, support is invoked for it wi...

The wedding festivities for Duke Odoardo Farnese and Margherita de' Medici held in Parma in December 1628 brought a commission for the music from the Ferrarese impresario, Marquis Enzo Bentivoglio, to Claudio Monteverdi, then maestro di cappella at St. Mark's, Venice. But Sigismondo d'India and other composers also sought to write for Parma, and d'...

Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and...

This study of Italian music in the 16th and early 17th centuries proposes new ways of thinking about styles and genres, performance practices and the social and political context of the period. The book includes evidence drawn from contemporary documents and copious musical examples. In studying the vocal and instrumental music of Italy during this...

Recent Monteverdi scholarship has set great store by the composer's last work for the new ‘public’ opera houses of Venice, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643). The problematic status of the sources for Poppea – at least some of its music is not by Monteverdi – and a rather prurient fascination with its supposed amoral excess have provided ample scope...