Commedia all'italiana, a genre of Italian film satires that emerged in the late 1950s and sustained through the late 1970s, is primarily understood through its close relationship to Italian culture. ...The evolution of the genre appears to be less tied to the revision of iconography and narrative codes of previous films than it is to the trajectory of Italian society during its years of prominence. The following thesis will attempt to find a definition of commedia all'italiana that is discrete from the genre's strong link to Italian culture by isolating the films' common narrative strategies. The aim in constructing this definition, which will be called the " commedia all'italiana narrative methodology," is to negotiate the possibility of formal elaboration upon the genre by a modern filmmaker, even outside of the strictly Italian context of the films in question. The viability of this endeavor will be put to the test in the final chapter, a plot outline for a feature film, entitled Commedia Vasca, that emulates the narrative approaches assembled in the commedia all'italiana narrative methodology. This thesis begins by presenting the common understanding of commedia all'italiana, with a particular focus on the genre's close connection to Italian society. The second chapter tracks the formation of the commedia all'italiana narrative methodology by isolating and analyzing distinct and adaptable narrative strategies at play among the films of commedia all'italiana. Then the thesis changes course to set up the creative experiment in narrative adaptation, Commedia Vasca, which will engage with Basque culture, rather than Italian. The plot outline for the film is preceded by a short summary of relevant Basque history and the ways the cultural specificities of the Basque Country influenced the process of utilizing and adapting the commedia all'italiana narrative methodology.
Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni uses Giorgio Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means to defining his directorial aesthetic. The book ...provides a framework for examining the director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive, using Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fifty-year career at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. This research defines Strehler’s multifaceted style and brings to light interrelationships among his various works, creating a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries can be made. It also establishes Strehler’s identity within the larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without delimiting our understanding of the director. Crucial to understanding Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is his consistent reinterpretation of the play, which received no less than five distinct productions during Strehler’s lengthy career. His repeated reworking of existing productions provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. The four key influences that defined Strehler’s aesthetic in his work with Arlecchino were commedia dell’Arte, Bertolt Brecht, “refractive theatricality” and Jacques Copeau. Through these productions, Strehler created a dialogue with his audience and helped change the reputation of Carlo Goldoni both in his own country and abroad.
This thesis documents my journey as an actor of faith, and an MFA candidate, through the development and production of the role of Beatrice Rasponi in an adaptation by Dr. Michael Kirkland of Carlo ...Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at Regent University. The introduction offers a brief summary of perceived challenges I expect to face and ideas to overcome them. Chapter One consists of my historical research of the playwright, play, time period, and my character. Chapter Two includes my textual analysis of the play, including plot structure, controlling and counter ideas, and spine phrases for all major characters. Chapter Three contains an in depth character analysis of Beatrice Rasponi, including an imagined backstory, moment to moment beat work, and physical techniques I plan on utilizing to bring the character to life. Chapter Four includes a rehearsal and performance journal documenting my progress along the way. Chapter Five is my conclusion, and contains discoveries and breakthroughs, response to criticism, advice for other actors, and a reflection on faith and acting. The Appendices contain our rehearsal schedule, production photos, the playbill, and my free associative writing.
This thesis is a documentation of my MFA Acting thesis process through the development and production of the role of Truffaldino in Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at Regent University. ...The introduction offers a summary of perceived challenges I expect to face during this rehearsal process and ideas to overcome them. Chapter One consists of my historical research of the play, the genre of Commedia Dell'arte, and interviews discussing The Servant of Two Masters with a critical lens. Chapter Two includes my textual analysis of the play, including plot structure, controlling and counter ideas, and spine phrases for all major characters. Chapter Three contains an in-depth character analysis of Truffaldino, including an imaginative free-written backstory, example beats in the script using practical aesthetics according to the structure in A Practical Handbook for The Actor, and perceived physical and vocal challenges associated with the role. Chapter Four includes a personal journal written during my rehearsal and performance process for this production. Chapter Five is a conclusion to my thesis which includes personal insights and discoveries made along my process, the evolution of my beat work explored in chapter three, personal reactions to criticism of my work, things I would change if I could play the role of Truffaldino again, and parting words of advice for other actors taking on the role in the future. The appendices include production photos, two production playbills (One for the Servant of Two Masters, the other for an original Commedia Scenario entitled The School for Sausage ), and select free associative writing as the character Truffaldino.
This thesis is a review of what I’ve learned as a student during my three years in the program for Master of Fine Arts in Acting at Regent University. I am basing my description below on the material ...learned in classes such as methods of acting, text analysis, and voice and movement techniques. In this thesis, I’ll explain the different techniques I have used to develop my role (Brighella) in the play The Servant of Two Masters . I will also elaborate on various subjects, each one of which is used as the base and the foundation for developing my role in the play. These subjects are included in the segments of my thesis as follows; in the introduction I briefly elaborate on some of the obstacles I encountered in preparation for my role. In Chapter 1 I will talk about my research on historical biography of the playwright and the play as well as my review on the play’s genre and its specific acting style on the stage. Chapter 2 will discuss a textual analysis of the play, its plot structure, and its counter and controlling ideas. Moreover, the spine phrases for all major characters in the play are included in this chapter. Chapter 3 consists of elaborations on character analysis, which takes us to a journey starting from the back-story, then to working with beats, and finally ending with discussions on how I implemented for my role the techniques of acting and body movements which I learned during my years at Regent University. Chapter 4 serves as a journal for rehearsals and performances of the play. This is where I will include the details of how I will apply what I learned through my research about the character to my act. Chapter 5 summarizes briefly all the previous chapters together with elaborations on how I took advantage of the guidance I received from my professors in playing my role. The appendix contains our rehearsal schedule, production photos, and the playbill.
This thesis examines the role of solid and painted masks in Giorgio Strehler's successive stagings of Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan between 1947 and 1997. ...Through my description and analysis of documentary evidence about these stagings, the Piccolo Teatro, Giorgio Strehler, his mask-makers Amleto and Donato Sartori, his actors, and lighting designer, I demonstrate that masks were used in the above-mentioned productions as rhetorical tools that expressed Strehler's relationship with Goldoni (the man and his work), communicated his political convictions on stage, partook in his attempted reform of the Italian theatre after World War II, displayed his vision of theatre history, proved his endorsement of the actors' potential in performance, and helped position the Piccolo Teatro within an Italian and pan-European artistic elite. My examination of video recordings and photographs of the productions, letters of personal correspondence, theatre reviews, transcriptions of interviews, and programme notes, among other documents, traces the evolution of Strehler's interpretative vision of the Commedia dell'Arte over fifty years. This vision, as I argue in the introduction and conclusion to my thesis, helped shape how other theatre directors, educators, as well as actors, mask-makers, and, arguably, academics have come to imagine Goldoni's work, Commedia dell'Arte, and masked performance. A close study of Strehler's successive stagings of The Servant of Two Masters and of the use of masks within them will therefore allow for a better understanding of Strehler's trajectory in the theatre, but will also exemplify how the use of a particular theatrical object (the mask) in a series of productions that were successful worldwide influenced how many of us now perceive a performance tradition (Commedia), a theatre (the Piccolo Teatro), and a play (The Servant of Two Masters).
Zwischen Wagnerismus und Verismo Fischer, Jens Malte
Archiv für Musikwissenschaft,
2012, Letnik:
69, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The essay examines German opera's precarious development, with special emphasis on the libretti, in the aftermath of Wagner's legacy, between ca. 1900 and 1920. The success of the fairy-tale opera as ...invisioned by Humperdinck and Siegfried Wagner was, with the exception of Hänsel und Gretel, short-lived—a condition that distracts from the fact that the artistically far more interesting Königskinder by Humperdinck, alongside Hans Pfitzner's Der arme Heinrich, were the most impressive examples of relevant and autonomous German opera in the wake of Wagner. Thoroughly independent of Wagner's orbit were the temporarily successful comic operas of German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, which were based on commedia-dell-arte plays by Carlo Goldoni, while German experiments in Italian verismo were ultimately not viable (notable exceptions are Wolf-Ferrari's I Gioelli della madonna and Max von Schilling's Mona Lisa). In spite of its impressive score, the enormously gifted Austrian composer Franz Schmidt's second and last opera (Fredegundis) met with failure, thanks to its tedious libretto. The Gordian knot of this unfruitful situation was finally severed with Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang and Die Gezeichneten, both based on his own libretti.
This thesis documents my journey, as an MFA candidate, through the building, development and growth of Florindo Aretusi in Regent University’s production of The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo ...Goldoni. The introduction of this thesis document outlines a summary of specific challenges I expect to encounter through this thesis process. Chapter One is composed of historical research of the playwright, play and commedia dell’arte. Chapter Two consists of my textual analysis of the play, including the structure of the plot, the suggested controlling and counter ideas, as well as spine phrases for all major characters. Chapter Three dives into an in-depth character analysis of Florindo Aretusi, including Florindo’s backstory, his unique spine phrase, sample beat work and physical and vocal techniques that will be practiced and implemented to bring Florindo to life. Chapter Four includes a rehearsal and performance log that documents my process through the journey. Chapter Five reflects on major discoveries, criticism I received, as well as advice I have for future actors who will tackle of the role of Florindo. The Appendices include the rehearsal schedule, a brief sample of my free associative writing, the program and promotional materials, and production photos.
This dissertation traces the emergence in late eighteenth-century Italy of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity, arguing that this link was forged as a means of assuaging ...anxieties about Italy’s role in European culture. For most of the century, virtuosic voices had dominated Italian “serious” opera: onstage, singers flaunted flashy embellishments while projecting the static categories of the Cartesian passions. But after midcentury, as new epistemologies of emotion converged with neoclassical aesthetics, Italian musicians and literati increasingly criticized those voices as inauthentic and unfeeling. In order to redeem voice, and with it Italian culture, reform-minded singers and intellectuals rebranded Italy’s most famous export as an agent of moral edification. They asserted that voice could make audible the interiority of a feeling subject, and potentially represent the political agency of that subject. Some reformers even attributed to certain voices the power to civilize humanity by cultivating feeling, inspired by the myth of Orpheus’s lyric song. The resulting complex of discourses and practices is what the dissertation calls “the lyric mode of voice,” a phrase which combines the ancient generic definition of lyric as musical poetry with the late-eighteenth-century literary mode characterized by emotional intensity, vivid subjectivity, and expressive immediacy. The dissertation explores the lyric mode of voice through representations of two archetypal poet-singers, or lyric figures: Orpheus and Sappho, who functioned both onstage and in literature as dynamic symbols of “authentic,” subjective vocal expression. By articulating the ways in which the lyric voice was rendered as cultural and political power, this dissertation unpacks still-resonant myths about uniqueness and agency. It does so by interweaving historically-situated musical analysis with interpretive threads from literary theory and philosophy. It thus intervenes in musicology by placing historical musical-vocal practices into dialogue with intellectual history, and contributes to Italian studies, eighteenth-century studies, and the history of ideas by demonstrating how intellectual histories might be excavated from the residues of sonic practices. In approaching voice as both a discursive category and a set of culturally contingent practices, the dissertation ultimately considers how historical ideologies and practices of voice together inflected “modern” constructions of subjectivity.
