La serva padrona
- Folena, Gianfranco. ll linguaggio della “Serva padrona.”In Muraro (#2576),
v.2, 1–20.
Librettist Gennaro Federico used a colloquial Italian text in his earlier Lo frate
‘nnamorato,but he did not write dialect in La serva padrona.Nevertheless, he
was able to delineate the fairly complex character of Serpina through nuances
of linguistic idiom, which Pergolesi matched with musical inventiveness. - Piperno, Franco. “Gli interpreti buffi di Pergolesi: Note sulla diffusione de La
serva padrona.” In Pergolesi Studies (#1392), 166–177.
Describes productions of 1733 and 1752 and lists 61 other performances with
casts and other facts about them.
Jacopo Peri (1561–1633)
- Peri, Jacopo. Euridice. Ed. Howard Mayer Brown. Madison, Wisc.: A-R Edi-
tions, 1981. ISBN 0-89579-137-4. M2 .R29 v.36–37.
The vocal score of Euridice(1600), the earliest opera for which music has sur-
vived. The editor has added a preface, critical comments, and notes on prior
writings. - Brown, Howard Mayer. “How Opera Began: An Introduction to Jacopo Peri’s
Euridice(1600).” In The Late Italian Renaissance,ed. Eric Cochrane, 401–
443 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Reprint, GL,v.11.
A useful review of ideas held by Italian musicians in the 16th century regarding
Greek music. Many believed that contemporary music should be modeled on
the Greek in order to achieve the expressive quality that Greek music appar-
ently had. Brown’s discussion centers on the Camerata, a group active in Flo-
rence in the 1570s to 1590s. Music written by Camerata members before 1600
had no special “effective expression”—it was typical courtly entertainment.
But with Euridicethere were new techniques for expressing emotion: “disso-
nance treatment, sudden shifts of harmony, so-called forbidden music inter-
vals, ametrical rhythms, striking juxtapositions—purely formal and highly
emotional scenes, and control of musical shape and phrase length.” These
devices were best suited to the portrayal of sadness and grief. Peri was less suc-
cessful in depicting happy feelings. - Palisca, Claude. “Aria in Early Opera.” In Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor
of George J. Buelow,257–270 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1995; ML55
.B84).
The prologue to Peri’s Euridiceis not a recitative, according to the definition in
Peri’s preface. It is an aria in the “16th-century sense: a melodic formula for
singing stanzas adhering to a constant poetic form.” Palisca calls it an “archaic
aria.” Other nonrecitative numbers include strophic songs that “later in the
17th century might have been called arias” and madrigal. Such genres are nei-
ther recitative nor arias as we think of those forms.
268 Opera