Aria from the Opera Orfeo ed Euridice for Brass Quintet (French Horn solo) by Keith Terrett Brass Quintet - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1446054

Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck, based on the myth of Orpheus and set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, meaning an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing.The piece was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 5 October 1762, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. Orfeo ed Euridice is the first of Gluck's "reform" operas, in which he attempted to replace the abstruse plots and overly complex music of opera seria with a "noble simplicity" in both the music and the drama.

The opera is the most popular of Gluck's works, and was one of the most influential on subsequent German operas. Variations on its plot—the underground rescue mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions—can be found in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio, and Wagner's Das Rheingold.

Though originally set to an Italian libretto, Orfeo ed Euridice owes much to the genre of French opera, particularly in its use of accompanied recitative and a general absence of vocal virtuosity. Indeed, twelve years after the 1762 premiere, Gluck re-adapted the opera to suit the tastes of a Parisian audience at the Académie Royale de Musique with a libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline. This reworking was given the title Orphée et Eurydice, and several alterations were made in vocal casting and orchestration to suit French tastes.

Ther picture is Count Francesco Algarotti, an Italian polymath, philosopher, poet, essayist, anglophile, art critic and art collector. He was a man of broad knowledge, an expert in Newtonianism, architecture and opera. He was a friend of Frederick the Great and leading authors of his times: Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis and the atheist Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Lord Chesterfield, Thomas Gray, George Lyttelton, Thomas Hollis, Metastasio, Benedict XIV and Heinrich von Brühl were among his correspondents.

''The Sicilienne and Rigaudon is one of the many pieces that violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler composed "in the style of" other composers. When he first presented and published these pieces, he offered them as recently discovered works by those other composers, newly adapted and arranged by himself. In the case of Sicilienne and Rigaudon, it is eighteenth-century French violinist/composer François Francoeur whose name is on the title sheet, though the piece really has nothing to do with Francoeur's style.

The piece is a simple and a charming one, however. The Sicilienne is a binary-form miniature that sweeps along on a characteristic dotted rhythm, with a rather melancholy melody. Think old French ballet. The constant 16th notes of the Rigaudon, give it a character quite unlike that of a traditional rigaudon-a cheerful Baroque dance movement in duple meter.