A NIGHT AT THE OPERA: Overtures Transcribed for Two Guitars in the 19th Century - The Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA LINER NOTES

Opera has always been a popular and influential musical genre. French opera of the 17th century gave rise to the ballet; Italian opera seria produced the vocal technique known as bel canto, with its emphasis on beauty of sound and brilliance of performance. Opera has even served as a vehicle of propaganda for kings, emperors and revolutionaries. The plots of all of the operas whose overtures are recorded here convey or glorify an essentially political message from the turbulent 18th and early 19th centuries. Today, in addition to attending live performances of opera, one can enjoy the music at home by means of radio, television and recordings. But in the 19th cen- tury, operatic favorites could be heard at home only by playing them on household instruments. Arrangements of overtures and arias, as well as potpourris and variations on opera themes, were created for myriad instrumental combinations. Demand by amateur musicians for popular music and the lack of copyright protection made the publishing of transcriptions lucrative, bringing about the production of a remarkable quantity of transcriptions during the first half of the century.