Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Insights into an opera stage director's work from an internationally acclaimed director and teacher. Opera is nowadays performed worldwide. But as an art form it is little understood by performers and audiences alike. The Crafty Art of Opera wants to change that. Here, Michael Hampe brings glimpses of the director's work to a wider audience, uncovering the many techniques and rules that should inform an opera's staging: the need for singers to know their orchestra, the importance of space around singers, the gestures of languages, what we all can learn from Mozart, and the primacy of sense over effect, to name but a few. He shows how stories, through music, become tangible and real. Packed with many anecdotes from the author's luminous career, this book is dedicatedto opera-lovers who want to understand 'how it is done'; to opera-makers who want to better understand their craft; and, last but not least, to those who loathe opera, in order to prove them wrong. Eminently readable, it brings both insight and wit from a life spent in opera as director and teacher. MICHAEL HAMPE is an internationally acclaimed opera stage director. The Crafty Art of Opera was published in German as Opernschule.

At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War.

This multidisciplinary collection of readings offers new interpretations of Richard Wagner's ideological position in German history. The issues discussed range from the biographical - the reasons for Wagner's travels, his political life - to the aesthetic and ideological, regarding his re-creation of medieval Nuremberg, his representations of gender and nationality, his vocal iconography, his anti-Semitism, his vegetarian and Christian arguments, and, finally, his musical heirs. The essays avoid journalistic or iconoclastic approaches to Wagner, and depart from the usual uncritical admiration of earlier scholars in an attempt to develop a stimulating and ultimately cohesive collection of new perspectives.

A Humorous Synopsis of the Great Operas. Stranded Stories from the Operas is aimed at the serious opera lover who, in addition to possessing a good knowledge of the subject, has a sense of humour. No author, until now, has dared challenge the esoteric world of opera by relating these stories in a humorous way: opera is far too serious a subject to be made fun of Times have changed. In this collection you will find the plots of both The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro told by Figaro himself in his own inimitable style; Samson and Dalilah and Salome retold in appropriate biblical prose; Shakespearian opera is represented by Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet while Wagner lovers, after reading Die Meistersinger, Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, may want to check their Kobbe. What really happened at the Polka saloon that night is told by Nick the barman in Minnie get your gun while Turandot's baffling riddles have been updated to reflect the advances made in education since those ancient times. Finally, if the reader gets as much pleasure from these stories as the author had in writing them and the illustrator in designing them then the time and trouble spent were well worth the effort.