What is interlude in theater and music

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What is interlude in theater and music
What is interlude in theater and music

Video: What is interlude in theater and music

Video: What is interlude in theater and music
Video: We Love Opera! What is the interlude at the opera? 2024, May
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Many modern names come from Latin words. From the word "interlude" you can immediately isolate two of its constituent roots: inter and medius, that is, "located in the middle." In modern Russian, this term has two main meanings.

Theatrical interlude

Initially, it referred only to theatrical art, but gradually the word began to be used more widely.

What is "sideshow" on stage?

In the theater, this is the name of an insert play, usually of a musical or dance nature, which is not directly related to the main plot of the performance and is performed, as a rule, during a break in the main performance. Sideshows are mainly played during the intermission, but can be inserted into the main action as a kind of thematic digression.

The history of the genre

Intermedia appeared in the European theater in the Middle Ages, when, under the influence of the square theater, a strict liturgical drama began to turn into a mystery, that is, secular language began to penetrate into canonical religious texts.

Representativeschurches could not allow the ritual performance of scenes from the Gospel to be violated, so the liturgical drama was banished to the city squares and finally transformed into a mystery. Under the influence of street performances, productions took on an increasingly comedic focus. So, in the end, an interlude appeared.

picture street theater middle ages
picture street theater middle ages

This genre spread during the Renaissance, especially in the Italian commedia dell'arte, completely built on improvisation. There were so many comic interludes that they turned into a separate direction called "farce". Another independent genre has grown out of them - comic opera.

In Russia, they learned about what an "interlude" was in the 17th century from foreign guest performers. Small scenes began to appear first in the court repertoire, and later in the performances of the school and farce theaters. At the beginning of the 20th century, due to the interest in the Italian comedy of masks, sideshows began to appear in Meyerhold's performances "Don Giovanni" and Vakhtangov's "Princess Turandot". Often, with the help of this technique, often containing plots of the past, the directors made a subtle associative connection with what is happening in the modern world.

What is "interlude" in the theater can be illustrated by an example from Tchaikovsky's opera "The Queen of Spades".

The scene of the reception in one of the houses of St. Petersburg: among the guests are all the main characters of the opera. And suddenly, at this time, the host invites guests to listen to a pastoral on a topic that does notrelated to the plot. This is how the “performance within a performance” begins: an elegant scene suspends the main opera action and distracts the viewer for a while. This is done in order to achieve even more tension in the following scenes.

interlude, opera The Queen of Spades
interlude, opera The Queen of Spades

Another meaning of the word "interlude"

In music, this is the name of one of the elements of a fugue, a complex polyphonic work. In this case, the term denotes an unstable construction between two passages of the theme, which connects different tonal sections of the composition. In addition, elements of the main and opposite themes are developed and combined in this part.

fugue stave
fugue stave

That's what "interlude" is in the theatrical and musical sense of the word.

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