LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at offering a guide to main styles and forms of musical theatre and instrumental music, considered in the

chronological development of history of music.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

9 CFU

The course aims at providing the student with the capabilities to acknowledge, understand, and describe symbols and meanings of musical language, increasing the awareness of the numerous relationships between music, literature, arts, and sciences. The student will learn to understand the strategies composers employ to transmit specific ideological, poetical, religious, political, or personal messages through the prescriptions, on the paper or other, which will enact the score, so that their message reaches the listeners through the performers. 

The main assumption of the course is that the knowledge and competence about genres, forms, and authors from the history of western music significantly completes the cultural preparation of any student of humanities. This will enable to correct a guilty failure of Italian school system, contributing to the assumption that music, differently than other disciplines in the humanities, must settle for an extemporaneous and acritical approach, as if it were an ephemeral experience to be consumed with eyes wide shut.

By the end of the course students will be able to understand a significant time span of the history of western music, having developed tools to acknowledge, understand, and describe musical language which could be applied, also in creative terms, to other contexts. They will be able to acknowledge, understand and describe the main genres of art music in Europe between Bach and Debussy, understand, discuss, and describe the aesthetic and style options of the composers considered, judge proximity or distance between movements and single composers. 

6 CFU

The course aims at providing the student with the capabilities to acknowledge, understand and describe symbols and meanings of musical language, increasing the awareness of the numerous relationships between music, literature, arts, and sciences. The main assumption of the course is that the knowledge and competence about genres, forms, and authors from the history of western music completes significantly the cultural preparation of any student of humanities.

By the end of the course students will be able to understand a significant time span of the history of western music, having developed tools to understand, discuss, and describe musical language which could be applied also to other contexts. 

PREREQUISITES

General interest in music and its use as an art form.

TEACHING METHODS

Class lessons with CD and DVD examples.

The class will attend a performance of I due Foscari at Teatro Carlo Felice.

The class will be invited to attend concerts and operas on stage in Genoa and at Teatro dell’Opera Giocosa in Savona, if related to the course programme.

Attending class is strongly recommended.

Registering to the course Aulaweb is strongly recommended.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The course might be chosen in a 6 (just Part 1) or 9 (6+3: Part 1 + Part 2) credit format.

No specific background in music is required.

Part 1: European Art Music from Bach to Brahms: a Journey from Baroque to Romantic Age

Part 1 (6 credits) will enquire the development of Western Music 1680 to 1890, from late Baroque to the Romantic age. The general outline of that historical period will be regularly exemplified in class through CDs and DVDs, leading students to a solid knowledge of styles, genres and main composers of Western Music from Bach to Brahms. The course will explore four seasons of European Music: Baroque, Galant, Classic and Romantic styles. 

Part 2:  I due Foscari: Young Verdi’s Crepuscolar Opera

Fall 1844: after Milan and Venice, Giuseppe Verdi conquers Rome, the third city commissioning a new opera to the young composer. Two years after Nabucco, Verdi’s sixth opera, I due Fòscari, is a very different work, featuring an introverted, crepuscular tone. Musical version of modern romantic drama, the opera stages a text by Lord Byron through the libretto by Verdi’s main literary collaborator, Francesco Maria Piave. Centred on three main characters, the opera intertwines the loneliness of power, the inexorability of state interest and the authenticity of family affections on the background of 15th-century Venice. The opera is based on a subject made famous in those very same years by the painter Francesco Hayez : the dramatic story of Venetian Duke Francesco Foscari, forced to abdicate after ruling for more than 30 years, greatly expanding Venice’s power but also having suffered his own son’s conviction to exile. Verdi transforms these private and public themes in moving stage action though his sophisticated musical language, aiming at granting the story a unitarian, typical and memorable colour.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Required Readings - Part 1 only (6 CFU)

R. Mellace, Il racconto della musica europea. Da Bach a Debussy, Carocci («Quality paperbacks» 560), 2019, p. 1-387.

Required Readings - Part 1+2 (9 CFU)

1. R. Mellace, Il racconto della musica europea. Da Bach a Debussy, Carocci («Quality paperbacks» 560), 2019, pp. 1-387.

2. Libretto and audio/video recording of I due Foscari by G. Verdi (score for those who can read music).

3. R. Mellace, Con moltissima passione. Ritratto di Giuseppe Verdi, Roma, Carocci, «Sfere» 82, 2013 (also in the following editions: Carocci, «Quality paperbacks» 514, 2017, Società Europea di Edizioni – “Il Giornale”, «I protagonisti» 28, 2022).

4. V. Bernardoni, … la musica, in G. Verdi, I due Foscari, programma di sala, Milano, Edizioni del Teatro alla Scala, 2009, pp. 42-46.

5. J. Budden, «Un bel sogetto (sic), delicato ed assai patetico», ivi, pp. 49-58.

6. P. Gallarati, Verdi, Milano, il Saggiatore, 2022, pp. 120-128.

7. M. Mila, Verdi, a cura di P. Gelli, Milano, Rizzoli («BUR» Saggi), 2012, pp. 260-269.

N.B.: nn. 2 (libretto only), 4 e 5 are going to be uploaded in the course Aulaweb in the second semester.

Nn. 1, 3, 6 e 7 are available in the University library or for sale.