Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro & Don Giovanni

Collection: Arts & Culture

Genre: NONFICTION > Academic Text

Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro & Don Giovanni

Role: Author

Written by a recipient of the Ernest Bloch professorship at UC Berkeley and Guggenheim Fellow. Allenbrooks demonstrated that Mozart鈥檚 music integrated references to the social practices and dances of his period.

Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music was a “pure play” of key and theme or more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook’s innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythm and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.