【托福听力备考】TPO12听力文本——Lecture 3

【托福听力备考】TPO12听力文本——Lecture 3

众所周知，托福TPO材料是备考托福听力最好的材料。相信众多备考托福的同学也一直在练习这套材料，那么在以下内容中我们就为大家带来托福TPO听力练习的文本，希望能为大家的备考带来帮助。

TPO 12 Lecture 3 Music history

Narrator：Listen to part of a lecture in a music history class. The

professor has been discussing Opera.

Professor

The word opera means work, actually it means works. It’s the plural of the

word opus from the Latin. And in Italian it refers in general to works of art.

Opera Lyrica or lyric opera refers to what we think of as opera, the musical

drama.

Opera was commonplace in Italy for almost a thousand years before it became

commercial as a venture. And during those years, several things happened,

primarily linguistic or thematic and both involving secularization.

Musical drama started in the churches. It was an educational tool. It was

used primarily as a vehicle for teaching religion and was generally presented in

Latin, the language of the Christian Church which had considerable influence in

Italy at that time. But the language of everyday life was evolving in Europe and

at a certain point in the middle ages it was really only merchants, aristocrats

and clergy who could deal with Latin. The vast majority of the population used

their own regional vernacular in all aspects of their lives. And so in what is

now Italy, operas quit being presented in Latin and started being presented in

Italian.

And once that happened, the themes of the opera presentations also started to change. And musical drama moved from the church to the plaza right outside the church. And the themes again, the themes changed. And opera was no longer

about teaching religion as it was about satire and about expressing the ideas of

society or government without committing yourself to writing and risking imprisonment or persecution, or what have you.

Opera, as we think of it, is of course a resurrected form. It is the

melodious drama of ancient Greek theater, the term ‘melodious drama’ being shortened eventually to ‘melodrama’ because operas frequently are melodramatic,

not to say unrealistic. And the group that put the first operas together that we

have today then, were, well…it was a group of men that included Galileo’s father Vincenzo, and they met in Florence he and a group of friends of the count of Bardi and they formed what is called the Camerata dei Bardi. And they took classical theater and reproduced it in the Renaissance time. This…uh…this produced some of the operas that we have today.

Now what happened in the following century is very simple. Opera originated in Italy but was not confined to Italy any more than Italians were. And so as Italians migrated across Europe, they carried theater with them and opera specifically because it was an Italian form.

What happened is that the major divide in opera that endures today took