Music-Genres & Styles-Opera

Author: Richard WagnerISBN-10: 0793553717ISBN-13: 9780793553716Publisher: G. Schirmer, Inc.Language: EnglishPublished: 11/01/1986Pages: 52Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.28lbsSize: 10.36h x 6.70w x 0.14d

While no one would dispute Wagner's ranking among the most significant composers in the history of Western music, his works have been more fiercely attacked than those of any other composer. Alleged to be an unscrupulous womanizer and megalomaniac, undeniably a racist, Wagner's personal...

In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as...

For anyone who has been intimidated, overwhelmed, or just plain confused by what they think opera is, Who's Afraid of Opera? offers a guide to what author Michael Walsh describes as "the greatest art form yet invented by humankind." Curtain up! It's time to...

"Opera completa per canto e pianoforte"--Cover.Author: Giuseppe VerdiISBN-10: 063407122XISBN-13: 9780634071225Publisher: RicordiLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/01/2000Pages: 328Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.80lbsSize: 10.50h x 7.90w x 0.80d

Leontyne Price: Highlights of a Prima Donna is a collector's item. It was published in 1973 and covers some of the most essential years of her life and career. It has circulated extensively via libraries and has been cited in a variety of magazine...

Celebrating the extraordinary diversity of operatic achievements in the twentieth century, this Companion brings together the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning with a survey of operatic legacies, the volume analyzes regional styles and aesthetic trends, and features essays on...

Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal...

France has a long and rich music history that has had a far-reaching impact upon music and cultures around the world. This accessible Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the music of France. With chapters on a range of music genres, internationally renowned authors...

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of...

A team of scholars and writers examines important Romantic operas and traces the origins and development of a style created during an increasingly technical age. The volume analyzes grand operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Hal vy and discusses grand opera in Russia and...

Richard Wagner is remembered as one of the most influential figures in music and theatre, but his place in history has been marked by a considerable amount of controversy. His attitudes towards the Jews and the appropriation of his operas by the Nazis, for...

Providing biographical, theatrical, and social-cultural background for Verdi's operas, this Companion examines important general aspects of their style and method of composition. Verdi's milieu, creative process, and critical reception are subsequently explored in essays by specialists who critically appraise his accomplishments.Author: Scott L. BalthazarISBN-10:...

Idomeneo, by common consent Mozart's greatest opera seria, is a rich synthesis of the dramatic potentialities of Italian opera seria, French trag die lyrique, and recent German opera. It was composed for the finest orchestra in Germany and some excellent singers. Mozart's relish of...

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde occupies a singular position in the history of Western culture. What Nietzsche called the 'sweet and terrible infinity' of its basic nexus of longing and death has fascinated audiences since its first performance in 1865. At the same time, its...

In this book Lucy Beckett gives a comprehensive account of Wagner's last and strangest opera. The literary sources of this work, its many links with Wagner's life and thought, its libretto, music and stage history, are all thoroughly examined. There is a full commentary,...

Peking opera is one of the most distinctive traditions in Chinese culture - a tradition that can seem mysterious and complex to foreign eyes. In this illustrated introduction, Xu Chengbei explains the colorful make up, intricate costumes, characters, staging, stories and music associated with...

Best remembered for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting...

German opera from its primitive origins up to Wagner is the subject of this wide-ranging history, the only one of its kind in any language. It traces the growth of the humble Singspiel into a vehicle for the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, together...

"...it is the evident quiet approbation which best pleases me! It is apparent that this opera is rising rapidly and steadily in estimation." -- Mozart, letter to his wife, October 7-8, 1791.Unfortunately, his tragic death a scant two months later prevented Mozart from ever...

Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera - the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well...

"Bring my goat!" Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Bess, whom he loves, has left for New York City, and he's determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment--New York is a great distance from...

Here at last is the definitive opera story collection, the only one now authorized by the Metropolitan Opera. Written by the associate editor of Opera News magazine, the volume includes the complete plots of 150 different operas, biographical information on all of the 72...

The listener, to understand the opera fully, should understand the situations, the shades of emotion, the nuances of characterization described in the music. William Weaver's translations of seven of the greatest Verdi operas are designed for maximum fidelity to the immediate word. Eschewing artistic...

Author: Nathan BroderISBN-10: 039300256XISBN-13: 9780393002560Publisher: W. W. Norton & CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/01/1964Pages: 388Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.93lbsSize: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.86d

Everything you could possibly know about Verdi and his operas, from the brilliant and humorous author of Wagner Without Fear. If you want to know why La traviata was actually a flop at its premiere in 1853, it's in here. If you want to...

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is well known as the composer of the earliest operas still performed today. His 'Orfeo', 'Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria' and 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' are internationally popular nearly four centuries after their creation. These seminal works represent only a part of...

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the...

Mozart's collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte led to the composition of three of the great masterpieces of opera. This book, designed to guide the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of these enigmatic works, charts the musical, cultural, and social context...

'A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan.' With these words, W.S. Gilbert summed up his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. In fact, Michael Ainger suggests in Gilbert and Sullivan the success...

Each entry in this New Grove series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed....

Jazz, the Charleston, nightclubs, cocktails, cinema, and musical theatre: 1920s British nightlife was vibrant and exhilarating. But where did opera fit into this fashionable new entertainment world? Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular...

Opera is often regarded as the pinnacle of high art. A "Western" genre with global reach, it is where music and drama come together in unique ways, supported by stellar singers and spectacular scenic effects. Yet it is also patently absurd -- why should...

Censorship had an extraordinary impact on Alban Berg's opera Lulu, composed by the Austrian during the politically tumultuous years spanning 1929 to 1935. Based on plays by Frank Wedekind that were repeatedly banned from being published and performed from 1894 until the end of...

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Culture: Three Treasures of Lingnan Series is a set of brief and illustrated introductions to three traditional art forms -- Guangdong opera, Lingnan school of painting and Guangdong music -- in south China. We hope these three riveting...

The Original Portrayal of Mozart's Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart's and Da Ponte's opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766-1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role...

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its...

Initially based on Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851), La bohème follows the trials and tribulations of young artists struggling to make ends meet. Despite their circumstance, they celebrate small wins, while seeking love and opportunity.La bohème is an Italian opera that centers...

This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates...

During the past twenty-five years, researchers have made impressive advances in pinpointing effective learning strategies (i.e., activities the learner engages in during learning that are intended to improve learning). In Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies That Promote Understanding, Logan Fiorella and...

Irish National Opera Director Fergus Sheil writes: It was bittersweet to read this book and write this foreword in the summer of 2020. At the time of writing, opera houses around the world are closed due to the catastrophic effect of the Covid-19 pandemic....

Enter the cross-cultural tale of gusto and enchantment, adaptation and loss, preserving the old ways of making a life. Presented in six acts with intermissions and curtain calls, it is a new form of literature presented in interactive libretto form. Read it silently, read...

This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in...

The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Ad鑚 has achieved a level of recognition and celebrity within the world of classical music today that is almost unmatched. Once seen as the heir to Benjamin Britten, both in his importance to British music and his...

A major anthology on opera in an age of global instability, with testimonies from leading figures in the fieldIn his epic drama The Last Days of Mankind, written in 1922, the Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus ridiculed the interconnected ills of modernity that...

A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political...

The Companion is an essential, interdisciplinary tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner's Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, and giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent...

A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Renowned opera scholar Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling...

Verdi's enduring presence on the opera stages of the world and as a subject for scholarly study by researchers in various disciplines has placed him as a central figure within modern culture. The composer's undisputed popularity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day,...

Mozart's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781-1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's...