![]() In this article, I explore the manner in which structural and expressive musical devices contribute to characterization in Baroque opera, using the role of Cleopatra in George Friderich Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724) as a case study. Of Kerman’s three dramatic possibilities, then, it is characterization that takes precedence in Baroque opera. Solo arias constitute the chief mode of expression in Baroque opera seria, and these musical monologues, through the intersection of music and drama, reveal the personalities and motivations of the characters who perform them. Though Joseph Kerman ( 1988, 214) proposes that music can enter into a relationship with characterization, dramatic atmosphere, or action in opera, the emphasis on the solo aria tilts the focus of Baroque opera to what Charles Rosen terms “dramatic expression,” ( 1997, 43). However, in this article, I contend that compelling relationships between music and drama may be revealed if the analysis of these operas is approached in a way that acknowledges the aesthetic principles that influenced their composition. Authors who do mention these works restrict themselves to passing comments or assume that they are inherently undramatic and, presumably, not worthy of study. Published in The Opera Journal, 47/2, September 2014 With few exceptions, there is a distinct paucity of modern analytical studies regarding the association of music and drama in Baroque opera seria. Leonardo Vinci, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Johann Adolf Hasse, Baldassare Galuppi, Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The schema sheds light on many aspects of galant music-making: its variants illustrate how central features of a schematic prototype motivate or constrain plausible manipulations, its pre-cadential function reveals the intimate communion between surface schemas and the harmonic patterns inscribed within the style's formal scripts, and, finally, its use as a climactic gesture in opera seria calls attention to the semantic possibilities of schemas beyond their role in defining musical topics. The Volta is a two-part schema featuring a prominent chromatic reversal: stage one charges up the dominant with a #4-5 melodic string, while stage two releases to the tonic using a ♮4-3 string. 2) This article presents an overview of a new pre-cadential schema in the galant style: the Volta. (This is a pre-final draft of an article that will appear in Music Theory Spectrum 42 no. The chief of these goals is the “essential structural closure” that provides tonal closure for the entire aria, as in sonata form. Its chief theoretical tool for approaching musical form is the “characteristic action,” a formal “schema” or “family resemblance” that unites the character’s dramatic agency (as musically embodied in the vocal line) with a series of musical goals (rhetorically highlighted punctuating cadences). The dissertation interprets the musical and textual parameters of the aria in this light, with emphasis on musical form and the interplay between the purely musical and the poetic text. ![]() Metastasio’s librettos theatricalize the moral philosophy of Descartes’ *Les passions de l’âme*, depicting characters who struggle to regulate their passions in order to act appropriately. ![]() ![]() In particular, the intellectual and theatrical climate to which the Metastasian da capo aria was adapted demanded many of the musical features central to Hepokoski and Darcy’s conception of sonata form: its orientation toward predictable punctuating cadences, its “vectored trajectory” toward closure, and its rhetorical layout in a series of musical “rotations.” The da capo aria’s features can be interpreted as a musical construction of a particularly eighteenth-century conception of subjectivity and ethical experience. It proposes a hypothetical reconstruction of the “generic contract” of the mid–eighteenth-century aria, whereby the individual musical features of the richly conventionalized form attain expressive meaning as the agents of the genre’s cultural uses. This dissertation develops a theory of the Metastasian da capo aria as a dialogic form, in the spirit of Hepokoski and Darcy’s *Elements of Sonata Theory*. Composers including Hasse, Galuppi, Gluck, Pergolesi, and Vinci composed dozens of settings of Pietro Metastasio’s librettos, each one containing twenty or thirty arias in da capo form. During the middle of the eighteenth century, one of the dominant streams of European musical culture was Metastasian opera seria.
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