The 18th Century, when Mozart actively worked, was the age of great changes asserting the realization of rational and reasonable society through the enlightenment theories and the modernization in overall society. Several conflicts being still existed...
The 18th Century, when Mozart actively worked, was the age of great changes asserting the realization of rational and reasonable society through the enlightenment theories and the modernization in overall society. Several conflicts being still existed amid such a great change wave revealed themselves as familiar life appearances to the public in being used as materials in art fields.
Mozart grown in such environment began to be interested in the genre of opera and to compose several opera works since his childhood. Among such works, he took a great role in developing the sub-genre of opera buffa by his works like The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte. These works combining his music and Da Ponte’s scripts expressed the situations of their times in humor and satire and revealed the opera buffa’s clearly unique characteristics by analyzing the figures. This led the match of music and play.
This thesis researched the musical characteristics, common, different features according to the characters’ status by comparing and analyzing 6 aria songs in Mozart’s representative opera buffa works. The summary of musical characteristics according to characters’ status in works being researched were as follows.
In music works for the upper class, Mozart used the seria musical components and express the nobility’s elegance and splendor by the slur and the long beat and the melisma. Besides, his use of slow rhythm and the quadruple beats effectively revealed the dignity and the sense of weight from nobility’s social status, and he also expressed the richness in utilizing various instruments groups. The use of leap and accidental marks and the relatively complex constitution expressed the nobility’s appearance conflicting between instincts as men and their social status.
The lower class’s music was mainly contrary to the upper class’ musical characteristics. They were cheerfully developed in the dance form through the fast rhythm and the six-eighth beats or was quickly developed in second-fourth beats adding the vividness effect. In opera buffa for lower class, Mozart shortly cut beats with the staccato and several commas to express the lower class people’s light, cheerful appearance and maximized the simplicity through the parts simply playing variations or repeating the theme song. It can know that this constitution effectively described the daily life of lower class who performed their given works without agonizing with well matching with Da Ponte’s description of characters.
Mozart analyzed the characteristics of various characters in opera works, not simply using comic elements in the genre of opera buffa, and composed music works appropriate for such characteristics. These features led the development of the opera buffa into a more stereoscopic genre. Therefore in playing Mozart’s opera buffa works, it is necessary to analyze the status, the personality and the background of each character’s role as well as comic elements multi-laterally and to play his works.