Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway's definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar's ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O'Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates "through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural," not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn's book enlightening and edifying.

The stage works of Saint-Saens range from grand open-air pageants to one-act comic operas, and include the first composed film score. Yet, with the exception of Samson et Dalila, his twelve operas have lain in the shadows since the composer's death in 1921. Widely performed in his lifetime, they vanished from the repertory - never played, never recorded - until now. With four twenty-first-century revivals as a backdrop, this timely book is the first study of Saint-Saens's operas, demonstrating the presence of the same breadth and versatility as in his better known works. Hugh Macdonald's wide knowledge of French music in the nineteenth century gives a powerful understanding of the different conventions and expectations that governed French opera at the time. The interaction of Saint-Saens with his contemporaries is a colourful and important part of the story.

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These cliches are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

Maria Callas was, perhaps, the greatest opera singer of the 20th century. Hers was a life lived on the world stage, and her fame extended to the public consciousness of many parts of the world. Even after her mysterious death in 1977, her singing and acting continue to thrill new generations of opera fans thanks to her many recordings and her fascinating life. This new biography of Callas tells her story from difficult beginnings as the daughter of Greek immigrants to New York City in 1923 to her wonderful performances at La Scala, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera. Callas was quite a diva and a master at creating a captivating public image. She also became notorious because of her very public affair with Aristotle Onassis, the wealthy ship-owner who left Callas to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.

Prokofiev considered himself to be primarily a composer of opera, and his return to Russia in the mid-1930s was partially motivated by the goal to renew his activity in this genre. His Soviet career coincided with the height of the Stalin era, when official interest and involvement in opera increased, leading to demands for nationalism and heroism to be represented on the stage to promote the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regime. Drawing on a wealth of primary source materials and engaging with recent scholarship in Slavonic studies, this book investigates encounters between Prokofiev's late operas and the aesthetics of socialist realism, contemporary culture (including literature, film, and theatre), political ideology, and the obstacles of bureaucratic interventions and historical events. This contextual approach is interwoven with critical interpretations of the operas in their original versions, providing a new account of their stylistic and formal features and connections to operatic traditions.

Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound and often surprising intersections between the sciences and opera during the long nineteenth century are here explored for the first time. These touch on a wide variety of topics, including vocal physiology, theories of listening and sensory communication, technologies of theatrical machinery and discourses of biological degeneration. Taken together, the chapters reveal an intertwined cultural history that extends from backstage hydraulics to drawing-room hypnotism, and from laryngoscopy to theatrical aeronautics. Situated at the intersection of opera studies and the history of science, the book therefore offers a novel and illuminating set of case studies, of a kind that will appeal to historians of both science and opera, and of European culture more generally from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian period.

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.

For decades, 18th century Paris had been declining into a baroque backwater. Spectacles at the opera, once considered fit for a king, had become "hell for the ears," wrote playwright Carlos Goldoni. Then, in 1774, with the crowning of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Paris became one of the world's most vibrant musical centers. Austrian composer Christophe-Willibald Gluck, protege of the queen, introduced a new kind of tragic opera--dramatic, human and closer to nature. The expressive pantomime known as ballet d'action, forerunner of the modern ballet, replaced stately court dancing. Along the boulevards, people whistled lighter tunes from the Italian opera, where the queen's favorite composer, Andre Modeste Gretry, ruled supreme. This book recounts Gluck's remaking of the grand operatic tragedy--long symbolic of absolute monarchy--and the vehement quarrels between those who embraced reform and those who preferred familiar baroque tunes or the sweeter melodies of Italy. The turmoil was an important element in the ferment that led to the French Revolution and the beheading of the queen.

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 the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

Over many centuries, women on the Chinese stage committed suicide in beautiful and pathetic ways just before crossing the border for an interracial marriage. Uncrossing the Borders asks why this theatrical trope has remained so powerful and attractive. The book analyzes how national, cultural, and ethnic borders are inevitably gendered and incite violence against women in the name of the nation. The book surveys two millennia of historical, literary, dramatic texts, and sociopolitical references to reveal that this type of drama was especially popular when China was under foreign rule, such as in the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) dynasties, and when Chinese male literati felt desperate about their economic and political future, due to the dysfunctional imperial examination system. Daphne P. Lei covers border-crossing Chinese drama in major theatrical genres such as zaju and chuanqi, regional drama such as jingju (Beijing opera) and yueju (Cantonese opera), and modernized operatic and musical forms of such stories today.

"Of the greatest significance ...The first volume of George Perle's two volume study on the two operas of Alban Berg ...is one of those few works of scholarship and analysis you can label 'definitive'; it may in time be supplemented, but not superseded."--Richard Dyer, Boston Sunday Globe "It is difficult to see how Professor Perle's exhaustive study can ever be superseded...or how such future work as may appear can do anything but add new details to his exposition of the basic clements of the work's musical language...After twenty years' work on the composer he brings to this study of Wozzeck not only a penetrating analytical mind, great scholarship and a comprehensive knowledge of the music but an almost uncanny insight into what seem to be the inner workings of Berg's mind."--Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters "If you have ever had any questions about Berg's opera Wozzeck, Mr. Perle probably answers them for you in The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume One/Wozzeck...An indispensable work on Berg's life as reflected in his work." --Donal Hcnahan, The New York Times "As with Perle's previous books, one notes with pleasure how well written is this one, how simultaneously economical and comfortable the prose, even when the subject is as complex and manifold as Wozzeck."--Mark DeVoto, Music Library Association Notes "A great and unique contribution ...[Perle] is a leading authority on Berg, and his analysis of Berg's compositional methods in the two operas is likely to be definitive."--George Martin, The Opera Quarterly "George Perle has contributed more than anyone of any nationality to a true understanding of Berg's music."--Douglass Green, Journal of Music Theory "George Perle ...possesses the kind of complete credential required for this study. [Volume I: Wozzeck] is a model of scholarly writing. Every paragraph, each quoted music example, each analysis moves the argument forward in a clear incisive manner ...Essential reading for the serious student of the music of Alban Berg."--Choice

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 many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.

Based on Verdi's autograph score and an examination of important secondary sources, including contemporary manuscript copies and performing parts, this edition of Il trovatore identifies and resolves numerous ambiguities of harmony, melodic detail, text, and phrasing that have marred previous scores. Scholars and performers alike will find a wealth of information in the critical apparatus to inform their research and interpretations.

Many know Antonio Salieri only as Mozart's envious nemesis from the film "Amadeus," In this well-illustrated work, John A. Rice shows us what a rich musical and personal history this popular stereotype has missed.
Bringing Salieri, his operas, and eighteenth-century Viennese theater vividly to life, Rice places Salieri where he belongs: no longer lurking in Mozart's shadow, but standing proudly among the leading opera composers of his age. Rice's research in the archives of Vienna and close study of his scores reveal Salieri to have been a prolific, versatile, and adventurous composer for the stage. Within the extraordinary variety of Salieri's approaches to musical dramaturgy, Rice identifies certain habits of orchestration, melodic style, and form as distinctively "Salierian"; others are typical of Viennese opera in general. A generous selection of excerpts from Salieri's works, most previously unpublished, will give readers a fuller appreciation for his musical style--and its influence on Mozart--than was previously possible.

From the 'old world' to the 'new' and back again, this transnational history of the performance and reception of Bizet's Carmen - whose subject has become a modern myth and its heroine a symbol - provides new understanding of the opera's enduring yet ever-evolving and resituated presence and popularity. This book examines three stages of cultural transfer: the opera's establishment in the repertoire; its performance, translation, adaptation and appropriation in Europe, the Americas and Australia; its cultural 'work' in Soviet Russia, in Japan in the era of Westernisation, in southern, regionalist France and in Carmen's 'homeland', Spain. As the volume reveals the ways in which Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe from its Parisian premiere, readers will understand how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse geographical, artistic and political contexts.