Post #6- Lecture Baroque Theatre- Modern Opera

In this week's lecture, we first talked about Baroque architecture such as St. Peter's Square in Rome, the Cesky Krumlov Theatre, and the Baroque Theatre, and how it was linked to the Counter-Reformation, celebrating the wealth of the Catholic church, another interesting fact is that it was characterized by new explorations of form, light and shadow, and dramatic intensity. Then we went more in-depth with the Cesky Krumlov Theatre, located in the southern Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, and how it t is a perfect example of Baroque Architecture also using the same type of technology that we saw in the Roman Colosseum but much more sophisticated with a very important new feature called the 4th wall. We then talked about a very interesting topic, The Baroque Opera. The first-ever operas were written around 1600 and they used dramatic text and music to express their stories, which were often based on Classical Greek and Roman mythology. Singing, dancing, instrumentals, and even some spoken text are the main characteristics of Opera. Around the middle of the 16th century, castrated males began appearing as sopranos in church choirs, they were called the Castrati. Parents would castrate their sons in barbershops for them to keep their high-pitched voice, unfortunately, things didn’t always work out, there was no way to guarantee results and many boys became rejects. It wasn't until 1878 that Pope Leo XIII banned the church from hiring castrati, with the last castrati being Alessandro Moreschi. I was really surprised and concerned when I first heard of this practice, and I'm really glad that they stopped doing this to innocent kids. Lastly, we talked about Cathy Barberian and John Cage. Two of the avant-garde artists stepped out of their comfort zone as highly regarded musicians to take music to another level and even though people called their compositions just "noise", they continued to revolutionize what music was.