Irene Brandenburg
Irene Brandenburg is a Senior Scientist in Dance Studies, Deputy Head of the Department of Art, Music and Dance Studies, and Head of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives. After studying musicology and Romance languages and literature (Italian studies) in Salzburg, she was a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome from 1992-1993 and worked as a research assistant for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe from 1995-1996. In 1996 she received her doctorate in Salzburg with a dissertation on the singer-castrato Giuseppe Millico. Since 1990 she has worked at the University of Salzburg, where she was a research associate of the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe (Research Center for Musical Theater), producing several editions and participating in music and dance research projects on stage dance in the 18th century. Since 2009, as director of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives, she has coordinated the indexing and digitization of selected collection holdings and collaborated on research and outreach projects. She researches, teaches and publishes on music and dance history topics, especially of the 18th century, and deals with (dance) archivological issues and contexts.
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In addition to the volume editor's detailed introduction to the ballet choreographies of Gasparo Angiolini and Carlo Bernardi, to the composition of the ballet troupes of the Viennese theaters in Gluck's early years there, to ballet forms and genres, and to the detailed account of the individual titles, the volume includes a general preface to volumes II/3 through II/5 by Bruce Alan Brown, which discusses Gluck's ballet music in Vienna in general as well as the development of the field of research into this genre.
"Don Juan" is a key work for the groundbreaking turning point in the development process of ballet into an independent dance drama in the context of the paradigm shift that brought about a radical reorientation in terms of dramatic means and dramaturgical parameters for all scenic arts during the Enlightenment.
In contrast, Gluck and Angiolini's "Les Amours d'Alexandre et de Roxane" is not as clearly categorised as a "ballet en action". The fact that, in contrast to "Don Juan", no scenario was published for the premiere and that Gluck's music is also largely conventional makes it clear that this ballet represents a kind of hybrid form between a narrative ballet and a divertissement. Perhaps the purpose of the performance, a festive show for Emperor Franz I Stephan's name day on 4 October 1764, also determined the genre to a certain extent, whereby it was probably also a matter of keeping court society reasonably happy.
Around the middle of the 18th century, there were primarily two theatres available for the performance of opere serie in Rome: the Teatro d'Alibert and the Teatro Argentina, one of the largest and most magnificent opera houses of the time. It had six tiers with 31 boxes each, which were sold in advance for the entire season, and offered the elite of Roman society - both secular and clerical - entertainment befitting their rank. As a papal decree forbade women from entering the stage, the female roles in opera productions had to be played by castrati, as was the case with Gluck's "Antigono": the ensemble for the premiere on 9 February 1756 consisted of a tenor in the title role as well as four soprano and one alto castrato.
In accordance with the dramaturgical and musical conventions of opera seria, Gluck's "Antigono" consists almost exclusively of arias. Only at the end of the second act do the protagonists Demetrio and Berenice come together for a duet, and in the third act Gluck composes the "Scena di Berenice", a large, richly contrasted scenic-musical complex consisting of an accompagnato recitative (the only one in the opera), an arioso and a final dramatised aria.
Like many other works of the short-lived Italian opera business in the 18th century, Gluck's "Antigono" disappeared from the programme after just a few performances. The fact that some of the pieces still sound familiar today is due to the fact that Gluck borrowed around a third of the numbers from Antigono from his own earlier works and also included some pieces in later compositions. Demetrio's aria "Già che morir degg'io", for example, became Orfeo's "Che puro Ciel" six years later in Gluck's first "reform opera" "Orfeo ed Euridice", while Berenice's highly expressive aria "Perché, se tanti siete" was heard again in Paris in 1779 as Iphigénie's air "Je t'implore et je tremble" in "Iphigénie en Tauride".
The dance and movement materials, the aesthetic variability, and the institutionalizations found in the various nineteenth-century performance arts (dance, opera, circus, variety shows) point to both striking and alluring praxeological and aesthetic intersections. A multitude of previously little studied documents and scores testify not only to their authors’ (choreographers and dancers) high professional competency in terms of dance-related movement on stage, but also provide a sharpened image of the capacities for testing genre divisions found in the period-typical movement arts more generally. As the materials present a variety of translation techniques and media (movement sketches and notations, verbal descriptions, illustrations), and as they function in a variety of contexts, they can be read as multi-narrative documents of manifold cultural approaches to ‘bodies in performance’ and their actions.
In 1769, the already famous soprano Millico met the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Parma where he sung the role of Orfeo in Gluck's Festa teatrale 'Le feste d'Apollo'. This meeting was decisive and portentous for Millico because Gluck's ideas of opera reform made a great impression upon the singer. That's the reason why Millico, one year later, went to Vienna where Gluck gave him accommodation in his house. In Vienna, Millico performed the roles of Orfeo, Admeto and Paride in works of Gluck and teached Gluck's niece in singing. From Vienna he went to London, and about 1780 he returned to Naples where he lived until his dead in 1802. In London, Millico had begun to compose a lot of songs for soprano and harp or harpsichord, called 'canzonets' or 'canzonette'. After his return to Naples, Millico was also composer of operas: in 1782 he published in Naples his first dramatic work, 'La pieta d'Amore', in 1783 followed 'Ipermestra o Le Danaidi', libretto from Raniero de' Calzabigi. The second part of the dissertation considers Millico as a composer, taking into consideration especially the dramatic works 'Ipermestra o Le Danaidi' and 'Le cinesi' and the canzonets. An appendix contents a catalogue of the singing repertory of Millico in chronological order and an index of Millico's works.