We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
OPERA AND CINEMA 10 1
The aims of the early Florentines had little in common with verisimilitude.
The renaissance spirit was far too near the antique, or c classic ideal/ to be led astray by an illusion so essentially a product of the nineteenth century. Any attempt at realism is forbidden by the artificiality of aria linked with recitative. Italian opera at its zenith is artificial in the extreme, and its value as art is largely by reason of its artificiality.
Mozart, who wrote in the Italian manner, has given us supreme examples in temporal art of the fusion of form and subject. And the c Tightness* of Mozart is this fusion, this transmutation into a formal world of strict limitations. It is the artificiality of his formal world, and the wholly satisfying experience we obtain in it, that is the quod erat demonstrandum of the form's genuineness. No greater beauty can emerge in a form of lower artificiality, for beauty is not quantitative in that way. You cannot say that because Gluck introduced reforms for his purpose, any one of his operas is, ipso facto, greater than, say, Monteverdi's Orfeo. Neither can you say of Wagner that all his work is necessarily better than Gluck's merely because he improved Gluck's reforms. It would be the same as saying one of the yearly daubs at the Royal Academy must necessarily be better aesthetically than an Italian primitive, an assertion we know to be nonsense. Unfortunately, in most descriptions of operatic evolution, such a fallacy is very much the impression a person unawares might obtain. It is the old bogy