Masque
The English masque is a courtly mask game of the 16th and 17th centuries and a direct ancestor of baroque opera in England.
shape
Rooted in the French ballet de cour and the masquerade, it forms an independent genre and has been in use in England since 1513. For the first time, the masque combined poetry, music, dance, costume, stage effects and architecture and was only performed at the court of the king's relatives. The focus was more on the songs and dances than on the dramaturgical cohesion; so drama and music were still separated from one another, because the vocal and instrumental music had no part whatsoever in the dramatic events. In 1609, the poet Ben Jonson added the so-called antimasque to the Masque of Queens as a contrast to the courtly masque, a parodistic, grotesque, often obscene performance that was performed with professional actors.
construction
After an introductory prologue, the masked actors (masquers) begin. This is followed by an allegorical main piece (also mythological content) with spoken dialogues, dance performances, choirs (madrigals), solo songs, pantomimes and airs (lute songs). The final part is formed by the main dance (a kind of ball in which the masked performers choose their appropriate partner) and, after the unmasking, the final dance, in which the audience also dances.
Agents and works
Important composers of the English masque were the brothers Henry Lawes and William Lawes , Captain Henry Cooke , William Child , Christopher Gibbons , Matthew Locke , Monteverdi's pupils Walter Porter and John Blow , and some of them tried to introduce the typically Italian as early as 1610 stile recitativo (i.e. of spoken song). The composers made the masque more and more similar to the opera and as early as the middle of the 17th century the term 'opera' was occasionally used for the masques. In the mask play Lovers Made Men from 1617, recitative musick is sung for the first time in the manner of recitative music , but this comes even closer to Nicholas Lanier's Hero’s Complaint to Leander (1628), in the style of Italian lamenti (chromatically falling fourths). Ben Jonson (about 25 libretti), John Dryden and James Shirley , the latter as the poet of Cupid and Death (music by Locke and Gibbons), which was successful during the Commonwealth of Nations, are particularly noteworthy as drama poets of the masked games . Inigo Jones was in great demand in the field of set design . He took the pompous, movable stage machinery of Italy and France as a model.
meaning
During the time of Cromwell's cultural bans , the masque was still allowed, but after his death (1658) it had to give way to the emerging opera and was only used as an intermediary or popular entertainment. If it was the breeding ground for opera in England with the drama, it had no further influence on English music in general.