Italian baroque opera and event

Abstract

The paper examines the cultural phenomenon of late Italian baroque opera (opera seria) in order to identify the reasons that led to the crisis of the genre in the middle of the 18th century and to its reformation. The relevance of the study is substantiated by the originality of its means: for the first time the analysis of music history is conducted on the basis of the concept of “event” proposed by Alain Badiou in his treatise “Being and event”. In opera seria the unity of the artistic whole is broken, and the dramatic side becomes secondary while music and virtuoso singing come to the fore. Fidelity to the event of an opera implied the development of musical virtuosity as the most adequate means of being true to its essence. Gluck restored the unity of musical and dramatic beginnings in opera. He understood it as a whole that formed from the unity of music and drama in which the creative spirit expresses itself in art. Thus, the technique of performance and the beauty of the melody should serve the idea of preserving the musical-dramatic whole. The reformation movement in opera showed that fidelity to the original event is preserved. Reformers wanted to preserve the tradition and to raise it to another level using other artistic means borrowed from the thesaurus of the situation by the successors of the genre, breathing a new act of existence into opera. A modern historically informed performance is an attempt to return to the event of “baroque music”. It leads to the creation of a separate genre which enriches the music with a special aesthetic experience. The creation of something new occurs by means of reviving the “philosophy” of the early musical art.