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La Donna è Mobile
"" (; "Woman is fickle") is the Duke of Mantua's canzone from the beginning of act 3 of Giuseppe Verdi's opera ''Rigoletto'' (1851). The canzone is famous as a showcase for tenors. Raffaele Mirate's performance of the bravura aria at the opera's 1851 premiere was hailed as the highlight of the evening. Before the opera's first public performance (in Venice), the aria was rehearsed under tight secrecy: a necessary precaution, as "" proved to be incredibly catchy, and soon after the aria's first public performance it became popular to sing among Venetian gondoliers. As the opera progresses, the reprise of the tune in the following scenes contributes to Rigoletto's confusion as he realizes from the sound of the Duke's lively voice coming from the tavern (offstage) that the body in the sack over which he had grimly triumphed was not that of the Duke after all: Rigoletto had paid Sparafucile, an assassin, to kill the Duke, but Sparafucile had deceived Rigoletto by indiscriminately ki ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canzone
Literally "song" in Italian, a ''canzone'' (, plural: ''canzoni''; cognate with English ''to chant'') is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition which is simple and songlike is designated as a canzone, especially if it is by a non-Italian; a good example is the aria "Voi che sapete" from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The term canzone is also used interchangeably with canzona, an important Italian instrumental form of the late 16th and early 17th century. Often works designated as such are ''canzoni da sonar''; these pieces are an important precursor to the sonata. Terminology was lax in the late Renaissance and early Baroque music periods, and what one composer might call "canzoni da sonar" might be termed "canzona" by another, or even "fantasia". In the work of some composers, such as Paolo Quagliati, the terms seem to have had no formal implication at all. Derived from the Pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time Signature
The time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, or measure signature) is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note value is equivalent to a beat. In a music score, the time signature appears at the beginning as a time symbol or stacked numerals, such as or (read ''common time'' or ''four-four time'', respectively), immediately following the key signature (or immediately following the clef symbol if the key signature is empty). A mid-score time signature, usually immediately following a barline, indicates a change of meter. There are various types of time signatures, depending on whether the music follows regular (or symmetrical) beat patterns, including simple (e.g., and ), and compound (e.g., and ); or involves shifting beat patterns, including complex (e.g., or ), mixed (e.g., & or & ), additive (e.g., ), fractional (e.g., ), and irrational met ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barrel Organ
A barrel organ (also called roller organ or crank organ) is a French mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The basic principle is the same as a traditional pipe organ, but rather than being played by an organist, the barrel organ is activated either by a person turning a crank, or by clockwork driven by weights or springs. The pieces of music are encoded onto wooden barrels (or cylinders), which are analogous to the keyboard of the traditional pipe organ. A person (or in some cases, a trained animal) who plays a barrel organ is known as an organ grinder. Terminology There are many names for the barrel organ, such as hand organ, cylinder organ, box organ (though that can also mean a positive organ), street organ, grinder organ, and Low Countries organ. In French names include ''orgue à manivelle'' ("crank organ") and ''orgue de Barbarie'' ("Barbary organ"); German names i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ritornello
A ritornello (Italian; "little return") is a recurring passage in Baroque music for orchestra or chorus. Early history The earliest use of the term "ritornello" in music referred to the final lines of a fourteenth-century madrigal, which were usually in a rhyme scheme and meter that contrasted with the rest of the song. Scholars suggest that the word "ritornello" comes either from the Italian word ''ritorno'' (meaning return), or from ''tornando'' (meaning turnaround or flourish). Literally, in Italian it means "little return". Baroque music The ritornello as a recurring tutti passage can be traced back to the music of sixteenth-century Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli. According to Richard Taruskin, these repeating passages are "endemic to the ''concertato'' style" which Gabrieli is credited with developing. The idea of an orchestral ritornello played an important role in the structure of opera in the eighteenth century. The most common form for an aria during the Baroque per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
