ROUSSEAU MUSIQUE DRIVER

However, by the early eighteenth century they were much more than that. They were the bourgeoisie literally, the “town-dwellers”. The middle class made up of merchants who traded in capital and goods, bureaucrats, and skilled artisans who served the mercantile and administrative needs of the towns and cities. The Middle Class and the EnlightenmentĪ small-to-middling middle class had existed in Europe since the High Middle Ages. However, by 1750 opera seria’s days were numbered, and what would drive it to its doom was the rise of an ever-growing middle class. Ultimately, the absolutist rulers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries co-opted opera seria in France, opera actually became a powerful propaganda tool of the state. Opera seria was embraced by the royalty and nobility of Europe, who perceived its heroic plots centered around ancient gods, kings, and warriors as a reflection of their own magnificence. It was the worst period of Italian opera.”Īnd so ensued the first of many operatic reforms, during which serious writers and composers periodically attempted to rescue and re-elevate opera from puerile entertainment to high art.īy the mid-eighteenth century, the dominant style of opera was opera seria, or “serious opera”: a formulaic operatic structure that alternated arias and recitatives, peopled by gods and heroes drawn from ancient history and myth singing music as overblown as the characters themselves. “Venetian opera had thrown dignity into the canals.

Sadly, Venetian opera’s growing popularity resulted in operas of ever-lower literary quality: dog-and-pony shows that featured insipid stories, visual spectacle, and over-the-top virtuosic singing. By 1670, there were seven opera houses in Venice, pumping out over 50 different productions a season. In 1639, the first public opera house opened in Venice. Its inventors were convinced that they were recreating, in modern guise, ancient Greek drama, which they believed was entirely sung. Opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a courtly entertainment. This article originally appeared on Professor Greenberg’s Music Blog Background for Rousseau’s Influence

ROUSSEAU MUSIQUE DRIVER

Rousseau also helped to redefine the role and substance of opera at a time when opera-like movies and television today-was not just a form of entertainment but both a reflection and a driver of the political and social values of its time. “transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before.” According to Will and Ariel Durant, writing in their book Rousseau and Revolution, Rousseau: Rousseau was one of the greatest and most significant thinkers ever born to our species. 240 years ago-on July 2, 1778-the Swiss-born philosopher, novelist, educator, music theorist and critic, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau died at age 66 in the township of Ermenonville, roughly 25 miles north-east of Paris.

Rousseau musique