Hey guys!
I don't know if it's permited to make this kind of requests, but here I go:
On the 9th of June I'll be taking college entry exams for a Musical Sciences course. I had to choose 2 topics to address. In which I chose:
1 - Verdi and Wagner: What impact they had in opera's history;
2 - Current and past musical events surrounding World War I.
I'm not entirely sure what format the exam will have. I'm speculating there will be a citation and I elaborate from there.
I'm kinda panicking because I've been reading some bibliographies and sometimes they seem so overwhelming that I'm not sure which points are the most important and should memorize.
For what I understand so far Wagner and Verdi were seen as opposites. Wagner the german titan with serious, complex and radical notions, finding meaning in drama and dance, music in motion. Leaving what is known as wagnerian harmony like the chord in Tristan. Inspired a lot of composers to come and in his lifetime was prestigious and influencial.
Verdi I don't know as much. I know he was the italian representative and hero of opera, writing popular, simple and conservative pieces. While persuing drama he did not foster philosophical ambicions for his art.
The topic about World War I is one I still haven't read much. I know that after WWI in Germany there was a "opera crisis" with Wagner saturation which led to a rehabilitation to Verdi's reputation.
If you guys could help me, what points about the topics do you find more important and relevant?
I'll appreciate any help.
PS: Sorry if I was confusing in any way. I tried to translate everything to english the best I could.
I can provide a little bit of information regarding the first question, specifically Verdi.
The impact that Verdi and Wagner had on opera is twofold. Firstly, they each inherited a national opera writing style whose conventions each composer experimented with, resulting in new, distinct ways of looking at opera and writing musical drama. The use of the word “national” here is a bit of a misnomer, as each of these composers began writing opera before Italy and Germany were even countries, which leads me to my second point: both Verdi and Wagner were in some way involved in the unification movements of their respective countries, both literally and as cultural icons. Wagner was actually an outlaw for a period of time due to his involvement in the failed 1848 revolution and Verdi’s Va, Pensiero from his early opera Nabucco was under consideration by the newly formed Italian Republic to be their national anthem. The nationalist overtones of the piece were not lost on the Italian public.
Before Verdi came along, operas written in the Italian Romantic style were expected to follow a specific pattern thanks in no small part to the works of Rossini, which set the standard for what an Italian opera was supposed to be. There will be certain types of characters. Certain characters sing certain arias at certain times. For example, there will be a morally upstanding tenor and soprano and they will most likely love each other, and the soprano will most likely be dead by the end of the opera. Set pieces (the big, main arias) would stand musically separate from the drama directly before and after. Even the very structure of the set pieces was dictated by convention. Think about how your average Hollywood action movie is set up. We can expect certain things to happen at certain times, thanks to the conventions set by pervious, popular action movies.
Verdi was notable in the history of Italian opera for his subversion of conventional opera story-telling. His characters were unconventional, his arias were not as sharply delineated from the rest of the drama, and the form of these arias would also be experimented with. And all this with catchy, crowd pleasing music.
Take Rigoletto, one of Verdi’s most famous operas today. The opera opens with an entrance aria not for the main character Rigoletto, but for a supporting character. Rigoletto isn’t morally upstanding, he’s actually a pretty terrible person. Further, he’s a baritone and not a tenor. The prima donna is not a love interest, but rather, Rigoletto’s daughter. Almost the entire length of the opera is scored with music, and is not punctuated with breaks between recitative and set pieces, as would be expected in a more conventional opera.
Sources and further reading:
I can't say much about opera. Are you working in German? Perhaps there would be a question about the pianist [Paul Wittgenstein](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wittgenstein_(Pianist)? Of all the musical events surrounding WWI, I have found his story to be one of the more interesting. Having lost his right hand in the war, he developed playing techniques for playing with only the left hand and asked composers to compose pieces for it. Maurice Ravel wrote perhaps the most famous, a concerto. Which stands nicely with Ravel's own homage to friends lost in the war, Le Tombeau de Couperin.
I think you could do a lot with #1 about the advent of Romantic opera - arguable Verdi and Wagner completely changed the game with not only their style, but with the sheer scope of their operas. The size of cast, orchestra, length, and so on, which is prevalent amongst other Romantic works. Not to mention Wagner's styles of leitmotif, and his prevalence for through-composing, which is some of the first times through-composition has ever been seen in opera, and had huge influences in later music, which is still being seen today. Not to mention the idea of leitmotif being a massive influence on films - John Williams and Star Wars, for example borrowed heavily from the leitmotif of Wagner.