Music
The music is a brilliant, youthful work, free of the influence of Bizet’s teacher Charles Gounod; it is a vital and sparkling imitation of Don Pasquale. The familiar idiom is infused with original touches of harmony, orchestration and melodic turn. The ensembles are particularly successful in using all the stock devices of opera buffa: voices in thirds, staccato chord accompanying and repetition of words. Ernesto’s "Non v’e signor" is an exact parallel of Malatesta's "Bella siccome un angelo" – in both, the baritone describes his sister's charms to the old man, in D flat.
Bizet used several episodes in later works:
- a 2/4 section in the first finale – the Carnival Chorus in Act II of La jolie fille de Perth
- the chorus “Cheti piano!” – “Chante, chante encore” in Act I of Les pêcheurs de perles
- “Sulle piume” – Smith’s serenade in La jolie fille de Perth
while the March in Act I is taken from the finale of his Symphony in C of 1855.
Read more about this topic: Don Procopio
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Franceska: I was happy in the life I built up for myself. I put a fine high wall of music around me and nothing could touch me. I was safe and secure. And then you had to come along and knock it all down and I hate you for that.
Maxwell: On the contrary, you love me.”
—Muriel Box (b. 1905)
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation’s prayer ever in dumb music ascending.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)