[It.: = bravery, spirit.]
1. Display of daring or defiance; brilliancy of execution, dash; attempt at brilliant performance.
1813. Examiner, 3 May, 282/1. A Thunder Storm [picture] has a bravura both of conception and execution.
1845. Blackw. Mag., LVIII. 260. The great vice of the present day is bravura—an attempt to do something beyond the truth.
1865. Carlyle, Fredk. Gt., X. XIX. vi. 123. Most shameful this burning of Habelschwert by way of mere bravura.
1879. Athenæum, No. 2709. The idea, spontaneous and thrillingly simple, has none of their bravura.
2. A passage or piece of music requiring great skill and spirit in its execution, written to task the artist’s powers. Also transf.
1788. ‘A. Pasquin,’ Childr. Thespis (1792), 136. In the lofty bravuras she copies the spheres.
1822. W. Irving, Braceb. Hall (1849), 44. Listening to a lady amateur skylark it up and down through the finest bravura of Rossini or Mozart.
1846. De Quincey, Syst. Heavens, Wks. 1854, III. 196. A short bravura of John Paul Richter…. I call it a bravura, as being intentionally a passage of display and elaborate execution.
3. attrib. in the musical sense.
1802. Edin. Rev., I. 217. What a Scotch or Irish melody is to a bravura singer.
1845. E. Holmes, Mozart, 121. The bravura style of violin playing. Ibid., 253. The bravura passages should subserve good musical ideas.
1850. L. Hunt, Autobiog., I. vi. 232. His popular, and not very refined style of bravura-singing.
1880. Grove, Dict. Mus., I. 272/1. Bravura songs, requiring a compass and a power of execution out of the common.
Hence Bravuraish a.
1879. Art Jrnl., June, 113. This accomplished artist’s bravuraish handling and colouring.
