Musica Mia: Italian Opera

Musica Mia, My Music is a little guide to Italian music available in the United States and imported from Italy. We have selected Italian music from Amazon.com featuring CDs from Italy like Festival of Sanremo and Greatest Hits by Italian singers and groups. You will also find a selection of websites that carry Italian MP3 songs and albums as well as iTunes of Italian artists. If you prefer to order directly from Italy, ibs.it will ship your Italian music, movies, books and video games anywhere in the world. We hope you'll enjoy Musica Mia and find it useful, we encourage you to suggest this site to your friends and to include it in your favorite websites. Grazie!

The Music of Italy

Italian CDs in USA

Amazon.com

CdUniverse.com

ArkivMusic Classical

Italian MP3, iTunes

Italian Radio

List of radio stations

Italian CDs from Italy

ibs.it musica italiana

Italian Opera

Opera originated in Italy in the late 1500s during the time of the Florentine Camerata.
Through the centuries that followed, opera traditions developed in Venice and Naples; the operas of Claudio Monteverdi, Alessandro Scarlatti, and, later, of Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti flourished.
Opera has remained the musical form most closely linked with Italian music and Italian identity. This was most obvious in the 19th century through the works of Giuseppe Verdi, an icon of Italian culture and pan-Italian unity.
Italy retained a Romantic operatic musical tradition in the early 20th century, exemplified by composers of the so-called Giovane Scuola, whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo Boito, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Francesco Cilea.
After World War I, however, opera declined in comparison to the popular heights of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Causes included the general cultural shift away from Romanticism and the rise of the cinema, which became a major source of entertainment.
A third cause is the fact that "internationalism" had brought contemporary Italian opera to a state where it was no longer "Italian".
This was the opinion of at least one prominent Italian musicologist and critic, Fausto Terrefranca, who, in a 1912 pamphlet entitled Giaccomo Puccini and International Opera, accused Puccini of "commercialism" and of having deserted Italian traditions.
Traditional Romantic opera remained popular; indeed, the dominant opera publisher in the early 20th century was Casa Ricordi, which focused almost exclusively on popular operas until the 30s, when the company allowed more unusual composers with less mainstream appeal.
The rise of relatively new publishers such as Carisch and Suvini Zerboni also helped to fuel the diversification of Italian opera.
Opera remains a major part of Italian culture; renewed interest in opera across the sectors of Italian society began in the 1980s. Respected composers from this era include the well-known Aldo Clementi, and younger peers such as Marco Tutino and Lorenzo Ferrero.

Italian Opera at Wikipedia