| FT-58287-10 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Melina Esse | Saffo's Lyre: Improvisation and Neoclassicism in Italian Opera | 5/1/2010 - 9/30/2010 | $6,000.00 | Melina | | Esse | | | | University of Rochester | Rochester | NY | 14627-0001 | USA | 2010 | Music History and Criticism | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
The emergence of an unadorned, dramatic singing style in Italian opera of the mid 1800s is often credited to increasing composerly control over singers "taste for improvised ornament" as a triumph of the written text over an oral culture of ephemeral sensation. My project, in contrast, suggests that this style may have been inspired by operatic encounters with the improvvisatrice, a female improviser of (often chanted or sung) poetry. Giovanni Pacini's Saffo, for instance, embodies an ideal of performance in which creation and execution are fused together in a moment of divine inspiration. Now overshadowed by caricatures of capricious divas, the improvvisatrice challenges traditional histories of opera because she represents a uniquely Italian alloy of Romantic and neoclassical aesthetics. |