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1. IntroductionThe emergence of the institution of the opera house, as a place for the performance of works of musical theater, is closely associated with the emergence of the genre of opera around 1600 and its subsequent spread throughout Europe. Until the first decades of the 17th century in Italy, theatrical works with music, including the first operas, were performed at princely courts in the context of festive events that were not open to the public (Festival 6.). Princes’ aims here were sel…

1. IntroductionFrom the first appearance of the term chamber music around the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th, the understanding of the concept changed from a form of vocal and instrumental music-making and performance associated with the court, to an autonomous form of instrumental music with the highest aesthetic standards. In the string quartet of Vienna Classicism (Classics, European), it gave the world a mode of instrumentation that assumed the highest status in the hierarchy of musical genre.Hendrikje Mautner2. The context of court music and early re…

In a broader sense, music criticism is any form of aesthetic judgment of a musical work. In a stricter sense, the term denotes a discourse of middle-class musical culture that began in the early 18th century.The process by which music developed into an autonomous art, together with the formation of a musical culture shaped by the middle classes, generated public reflection on musical practice in new specialist journals. The first two musical periodicals were founded at Hamburg in the early 18th century: Johann Mattheson’s  Critica musica (1722/23 and 1725) and Johann Ado…

1. Precursors and originsIn the first half of the 14th century, madrigale was an Italian poetic genre, the leading exponents of which included Petrarch. At first, the term occurred only in treatises on literary forms (Poetry), but the madrigal as a musical form also began to find its way into musical treatises from the second half of the 14th century. The trecento madrigal, based on strictly defined rules of form and versification, disappeared from musical sources early in the 15th century.Hendrikje Mautner2. Centers in the first half of the 16th century 2.1. FlorenceAround 1530, …

1. Concept The Italian  recitativo is derived from the Latin recitare, a specialist term for reading out or reciting texts, such as a document during public proceedings. The concept was already used in a more general sense in ancient Rome to refer to readings of literary works, particularly dramatic works and especially comedy. The Italian verb recitare already began to occur sporadically in musical contexts in the 16th century (e.g. 1508, Baldassare Castiglione; 1558, Gioseffo Zarlino), even before the emergence of the monodic (Monody) style to which the term  stile recitativo (r…