The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell

I have an entire playlist dedicated to Disney music. Their songs and movies can make anyone smile no matter how bitter you are. Everybody has watched Disney movies back when they were a kid, and have always regarded as happily-ever-after stories. But that was not always the case. What if I told you that in the original Cinderella the stepsisters chopped off parts of their feet to try to get the infamous glass shoe to fit. But how did it get from chopping feet to turning a pumpkin into an extravagant carriage? Was it media? All forms of media have a big effect on the general conception; from the printing press and Thomas Jefferson to televised news and Donald Trump. Or did our ever changing society create this facade of happily-ever-after that is sought after so often? In the article Fairy Tales and a Dose of Reality by Catherine Orenstein she utilizes historical references and allusions to modern media and challenges the perception of fairy tales and expose them as media-manipulated, romanticized stories.

The Baroque era began in the year 1600, at the end of the Renaissance period (Kamien 99). The word Baroque has had several different meanings. Back in its time, the word Baroque has meant: Bizarre, Flamboyant, and Elaborately ornamented. Historians, however, used this word to indicate the particular style in all different forms of art that fills space; which includes canvas, stone, or sound (Kamien 99). The Baroque Period is also known as “the age of absolutism” because so many different rulers of the time used and abused their royal power to control their subjects. For example, in Germany, the duke of Weimar imprisoned the famous Johann Sebastian Bach into prison for a month just because Bach asked to leave his job as the Duke’s musician (Kamien 99). This era in time was also home to scientific discoveries by Newton and Galileo. The Baroque era has shaped the world, as they knew it, to what the people of the twenty-first century all know and love.

The Baroque Era started in 1600 and lasted till 1750. Some of the famous composers from the Baroque Era include Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Handel, and JS Bach. Music in Baroque society became amusement for aristocrats, modern orchestra began to evolve, and the idea of opera are beginning to develop. In many Baroque pieces the use of a Basso Continuo, which is played by two instruments typically a keyboard and a member of the strings family was found in many pieces during this time. The Baroque period can be characterized with clear and distinct meter, repeated rhythmic patterns, homophonic texture, and terraced dynamics. The Baroque is also classified by its distinct genres including Fugue, Solo Concerto, and Cantata. The Ritornello form being introduced had an impact on Baroque music because it is outlined using harmonic progressions, key modulations, and motives from the main theme in order to give character to a piece.

The Prince stereotypes the role of women being in need of a destined lover. He is the one that identifies Cinderella as the one in the dress, though excluding behavior, her appearance dazzles him for two nights at the ball. Most importantly, he’s not the hero of the fairytale, but readers can interpret the fairy godmother as the savior of Cinderella’s demise. The role of magic comes in part with the acceptance of achieving the imagery of an elegant woman, impressing the Prince who gains interest in her. The

Music during the Baroque period was diverse and composers began to rebel against the styles that were popular during the Renaissance. In the Baroque era music was driven by the text and the emotions behind it. Vocal and sacred music developed greatly during the Baroque period. During the mid-17th century the Italian phenomenon opera dominated most of the theatres in Europe. Sacred music was deeply influenced by the opera, contributing to the development of the oratorio and cantata genre. The opera, oratorio, and cantata contain musical similarities; among all three genres they feature recitative, soloist orchestras, and duet arias.

Music of the baroque period was considered very complex and similar to the other forms of art of this time. Additional brass, woodwind and string instruments had been created to add additional depth to the works of this time. Composers of this time attempted to give voices to their works and invoke emotions. The works were created to tell a story.

As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White

Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz discuss the concept of female empowerment through beauty in their article “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tale.” Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz state that, “women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive” (712). Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz argue that in children’s fairy tales, the female characters see their beauty as their most useful tool and would undergo “beauty rituals” to attain this beauty. By being beautiful, the Fairy Queen is able to win the attention and loyalty of Lanval. Not only does the Fairy Queen receive power in this bond, but also Lanval himself finds good fortune in the form of physical wealth. To further emphasize the Fairy Queen’s beauty and the power she holds over the court, France uses the series of girls prior to the Fairy Queen’s entrance. This builds a sense of suspense and the fact that the Fairy Queen easily trumps the girls in beauty further emphasizes her superiority. By emphasizing the Fairy Queen’s bodily beauty, France is able to show the power the Fairy Queen has over Lanval and the court.

At the time of writing ‘Die Zauberflöte’, fairytales were a hot commodity in Europe, with many successful operas derived from fairytales circulating the theatre. A standard formula for a fairytale often involved an intricate yet striking balance of polar opposites: comic and serious, realism and magic, wisdom and foolishness, light and dark, virtue and vice, masculine and feminine. At the time the opera was being written the production theatre needed a commercial hit, so Mozart and his librettist cleverly drew inspiration from these fairytale classics and incorporated it into their story. Tamino’s coming of age and seeking the princess quests, the monster, the magic instruments, opposed forces of good and evil, references to variety of higher

Music during the Baroque era was regarded as a powerful form of communication that could invoke any emotion in the audience members. This philosophical belief was derived from a revival of the ideas of the Greco-Roman culture. As a result of these ideas, composers believed that they could also affect their listeners through the power of melody, harmony, rhythm, and stylistic details. The emphasis on communication was reflected in the major styles and components that were used throughout Baroque compositions. Baroque music is characterized by the composers’ attention to detail, such as contrast in dynamics, ornamentation, and the emphasis on bass line. These characteristics of the Baroque era of music are reflected in Antonio Vivaldi’s compositions. Known as one of the most popular pieces in Baroque repertoire, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons reveals how composers of the Baroque period used different techniques, such as ritornello and contrast, to invoke emotion through the powerful communication of music. The Four Seasons perfectly represents the Baroque period because of Vivaldi 's style, techniques, and theme.

The Baroque time period was a time of artistic style extravagant motion and clear, simply interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, excitement, and magnificence in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and music. Opera is an arrangement in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining libretto (text) and musical score, typically in a theatrical setting. Opera came out of the baroque period of people wanting to make music that was more expressive. A group of people in Italy decided that a single line of melody with simple accompaniment would be much more expressive than words. This caused the creation of recitatives, which early operas consisted entirely of. This also caused arias, duets, and

First, in the baroque period vocal and instrumental music had the same importance, this allowed that the composers had a wide range in composition types. Some composers chosen more vocally style and others preferred the instrumental style, which generated an amount of balance in composition during this period. In addition, instruments were created with specific features to perform the baroque music, they presented a sound and form characteristic, they were built to sound full and rich, but in small-type-sized, mainly strings instruments. The bow and the technique to play this kind of music required a careful and distinct method which caused that its texture and timbre were unique and special for that era. The most representative instruments of baroque period were organ and harpsichord, however, in most of the compositions of this period strings, woodwinds and brass instruments were also used by the compositors, and these instruments were important for the baroque orchestra. Some instruments used in the baroque period were: violin, viola da gamba, lute, violoncello, oboe, bassoon and trumpet. Moreover, baroque orchestra was characterized as small number of instrumentalists, and it was form mainly by strings instruments with a few woodwinds and brass, which gave the colorful contrast in the orchestra, this was called chamber orchestra. On

The origins of the Queen of the Night are found in the story Lulu, oder der Zauberflöte (Lulu, or the Magic Flute) by Jakob August Liebeskind, published in a collection of fairy tales called Dschinnistan. In Lulu, a youth finds himself in the kingdom of a fairy queen, known as the ‘radiant fairy’. Like the Queen of the Night, this fairy queen asks the youth to rescue her daughter, whom has been captured by an evil sorcerer, and is given a magic flute to aid him (Spaethling 1975, pp. 48 -49). However, unlike the fairy queen, the Queen of the Night is revealed as the villain of the opera and has deceived Tamino. It has been suggested that Schikaneder changed directions in the libretto due to a similar opera opening before Die Zauberflӧte, called Kaspar der Fagottist, which would account for the seemingly sudden change in the personality and purpose of the Queen. However, this view is largely discredited now (Branscombe 1991, p. 29). It is more likely that Mozart and Schikaneder had intended for this dual

The Baroque Period (1600-1750) was mainly a period of newly discovered ideas. From major new innovations in science, to vivid changes in geography, people were exploring more of the world around them. The music of the baroque period was just as extreme as the new changes. Newly recognized composers such as Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Monteverdi were writing entirely new musical ideas and giving a chance for new voices to be heard that were normally not thought of sounds. Their musical legacy is still recognized today, and is a treasured discovery of outstanding compositions being reiterated with every performance of them.

In regards to the decoration of Baroque music, amateurs often think that Baroque music is extremely ornamented. This practice is a more recently acceptable practice: scholar Ronald