High Art in Song

Question: Where, in the Gilbert and Sullivan musical, did a certain group of pirates live?

Answer: William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance debuted in 1879. Penzance is a town in Cornwall, a part of southern England.

Question: Who composed Madama Butterfly?

Answer: Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), about a Japanese girl who loves an American naval officer, is one of the most popular operas ever written.

Question: Which of these is not an example of musical theater?

Answer: Musical theater involves storytelling and dialog as well as music. The Blue Danube is a famous waltz, but it has no spoken or sung elements.

Question: A chanson would most likely be written in:

Answer: Chanson is the French word for "song." It is also the word for a specific kind of French song that became popular in the Middle Ages.

Question: Which of these poets was not a favorite of the 16th-century Italian madrigal composers?

Answer: William Shakespeare came after the time of the madrigalists. The favorite poets of the madrigal composers were Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Battista Guarini.

Question: How many dances did Johann Strauss write?

Answer: In addition to more than 400 dance compositions, Johann Strauss wrote 16 operettas.

Question: Which of these was a forerunner of the madrigal?

Answer: The Florentine carnival song and the Mantuan frottola (a type of secular song) were important forerunners of the 16th-century madrigal.

Question: When was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring first performed?

Answer: When first performed in Paris in 1913, Stravinsky’s very untraditional ballet The Rite of Spring provoked a riot in the audience. It was, however, soon recognized as a prophetic masterpiece.