Home
Resource
The concert arias of Mozart: eighteenth-century operatic culture outside the theater
PDF
PDF format is widely accepted and good for printing.
Plug-in required
PDF-1(83.26 MB)
Citation & Export
View Usage Statistics
Staff View

Citation & Export
Hide

Simple citation

Goetjen, Michael. The concert arias of Mozart: eighteenth-century operatic culture outside the theater. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-h1qq-y250

Export

Click here for information about Citation Management Tools at Rutgers.

Statistics
Hide

Description

TitleThe concert arias of Mozart: eighteenth-century operatic culture outside the theater
NameGoetjen, Michael (author); Cypess, Rebecca (chair); Johnson, Douglas (member); Chong, Nicholas (member); Brown, Bruce (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-05 (degree)
SubjectMusic, Music history, Fine arts, Aria, Concert, Genre, Metastasio, Opera, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. -- Arias -- Criticism and interpretation
Extent367 pages : illustrations
DescriptionAlthough the term “concert aria” is a later scholarly appellation applied after Mozart’s lifetime to a group of his works which were not considered a unified genre in the eighteenth century, there are still through-lines which bind them together. In considering the “true” concert arias for unstaged concert performance as well as substitution arias in works by other composers, I propose a way of understanding the commonalities among these pieces that further illuminates how operatic culture was received outside the theater in the late eighteenth century. By examining these pieces in light of their origin in the private-public space of salons and house concerts as well as the public concert, I show that the juxtaposition of private and public aesthetics obtains across the whole repertoire. In this way, I argue for an understanding of the concert aria as a genre that includes a more diverse range of Mozart’s miscellaneous operatic works than simply the “true” concert arias.Building on this formulation, I analyze the ways in which Mozart achieves surprising stylistic idiosyncrasies in these works through three different lenses. First, I examine the arias that set texts previously set by other composers in light of questions of influence and emulation to determine how Mozart’s motivations in creating these settings affected their particular compositional features. Second, I analyze the arias that set texts by Pietro Metastasio in terms of their adherence to Cartesian and Enlightenment philosophies. Finally, I compare the concert arias of the 1780s to Mozart’s full-length opera seria works, Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, in order to show that these arias do not act as experiments in stylistic innovation to be used later in an opera but rather present opportunities for playing with stylistic features such as forms, instrumental solos, and virtuosic vocal writing for their own sake.
In this dissertation, I provide a conceptual and methodological framework that could be applied on a larger scale to similar works by other eighteenth-century composers. In doing so, I attempt to advance our understanding of the role of operatic music outside the theater and to show that these miscellaneous pieces are as interesting and worthy of study as the full-length operas by Mozart or any other composer.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-h1qq-y250
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
Version 8.5.5
Rutgers University Libraries - Copyright ©2024