Seria Culture as Interpreted by H. Haendel in the Opera "Caesar in Egypt"

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to understand the specifics of the cultural layer of opera seria, taking into account the church-specified mystical meaning of this genre and taking into account that artistically self-sufficient music first developed in the Viennese school, and the formed vocal of figurative singing, later designated as bel canto, had a pronounced church genetics and combined the meaning of "dematerialized", extraverbal expression. The elements of proto-Viennese art, indisputable in H. Haendel's presentation, do not remove the cultural and didactic direction of the entire opera "Caesar in Egypt" by H. Haendel. The methodological basis of the work is the position of the intonation approach of the school of B. Asaf'ev in Ukraine in the person of I. Lyashenko, I. Kotlyarevsky - and their numerous students who formed their own scientific schools (O. Kozarenko, O. Markova, O. Roschenko, etc.). At the same time, we highlight the hermeneutic-comparative, biographical-descriptive, stylistic-genre methods, as they reflected the discovery of the psychology of creativity in the works of J. Huizinga, M. Eliade, and other art historians. The scientific novelty of the study is determined by the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian musicology, the cultural value of the heritage of opera seria as the brainchild of mystery-didactic thinking became the subject of research, and for the first time in the indicated direction, the above-mentioned work of H. Handel was analyzed. For the first time, the cultural specificity of the performance of a baroque opera is understood, the ecclesiastical essence of which does not coincide with the classics of the staged "opera realism". Conclusions. The generalization of information about the existence of seria from the beginning of the 18th century to the 1720s indicates significant changes in the conditions of the presentation of this genre in the theater and the audience's attitude to the typical features of the characters of the classic seria, with a hagiographic undertone, while the German version by H. Haendel is "infected" with elements of psychologism and individualization of the characters. Ahistorically, in the pledges of the Christian worldview principles of love and mercy, the historical material is interpreted, clearly aimed at the didactics of attracting the authority of the famous historical figures Caesar, Cleopatra to the pantheon of Christian-recognized forerunners of the work of Christ. Stagingly, considering the mysterious background of seria, one should take into account the seriousness-ecclesiastical nature of the idea of that genre as a "concert in costumes", taking into account the celebratory-initiative nature of the influence of this kind of pro-mysterial performances.