SOUND GESTURES AND BODY GESTURES IN 18TH CENTURY OPERA

Composers such as Handel and Vivaldi used both opera style and concerto style: according to Ratner (1980), there was an interaction and an exchange between the two styles. The aim of our research was to collect evidence that the use of “gestures” was openly perceptible in the opera realm while it was implicit in the context of concertos, where musical passages similar to opera might be used. We examined Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare and we analyzed some arias belonging to three different emotional and dramatic categories: fury, love and pain. We also considered three fragments taken from Vivaldi’s concertos where structural and performative features correspond to the three categories described. As a general hypothesis we could say that composers and performers aspired to create clearcut expressive types with regards to these three categories. A clearcut definition was however possible only within the opera dramatic text, context and plot. Without characters, words and narrative elements a listener could certainly recognize the emotional aspects of musical passages, but could not precisely establish a semantic description.