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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca
Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music
histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this
misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry
fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a
social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context
and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot
and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and
Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's
perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and
cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women,
Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers,
as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining
the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth
century.
This book presents in comprehensive fashion the extraordinary
development of Ariadne auf Naxos from its conception to the final
operatic version. The unique collaboration of Hofmannsthal and
Strauss is examined and the classical myths that served as a basis
for the libretto are investigated. The detailed analysis and
interpretation of both the text and the music demonstrate that this
work is epochal in the history of early nineteenth-century opera
and commands central importance in the overall production of its
authors.
Offenbach's operas were a significant force for cultural change,
both in his own time and in the decades to follow. In this book,
Laurence Senelick demonstrates the ways in which this musical
phenomenon took hold globally, with Offenbach's work offering an
alternative, irreverent, sexualized view of life which audiences
found liberating, both personally and socially. In the theatre, the
composer also inspired cutting-edge innovations in stagecraft and
design, and in this book, he is recognized as a major cultural
influence, with an extensive impact on the spheres of literature,
art, film, and even politics. Senelick argues that Offenbach's
importance spread far beyond France, and that his provocative and
entertaining works, often seen as being more style than substance,
influenced numerous key artists, writers, and thinkers, and made a
major contribution to the development of modern society.
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 professional persona and his
modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians,
audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic
practices and traditions. Giving particular prominence to primary
sources, Simon P. Keefe offers new biographical and critical
perspectives on the man and his music, highlighting his
extraordinary ability to engage with the competing demands of
singers and instrumentalists, publishing and public performance,
and concerts and dramatic productions in the course of a hectic,
diverse and financially uncertain freelance career. This
comprehensive and accessible volume is essential for Mozart lovers
and scholars alike, exploring his Viennese masterpieces and the
people and environments that shaped them.
Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019
Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society
(AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in
Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for
Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in
Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance
Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The
Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential
source of entertainment during the pre-World War II era. But its
stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted
diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a
wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa
Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks
and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American
cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance,
and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond
the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex
history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of
government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a
Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese
opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of
Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions.
The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from
Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American
music and a profoundly American experience.
Richard Wagner is one of the most controversial figures in Western
cultural history. He revolutionized not only opera but the very
concept of art, and his works and ideas have had an immeasurable
impact on both the cultural and political landscapes of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From 'absolute music' to
'Zurich' and from 'Theodor Adorno' to 'Hermann Zumpe', the
vividly-written entries of The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia have
been contributed by recognized authorities and cover a
comprehensive range of topics. More than eighty scholars from
around the world, representing disciplines from history and
philosophy to film studies and medicine, provide fascinating
insights into Wagner's life, career and influence. Multiple
appendices include listings of Wagner's works, historic
productions, recordings and addresses where he lived, to round out
a volume that will be an essential and reliable resource for
enthusiasts and academics alike.
The author of the book analyses selected 19th-century operas based
on Shakespeare's plays from the perspective of their relations to
the literature, aesthetics and philosophy of the Romantic period.
The texts discussed here include Verdi's Macbeth, Otello and
Falstaff, Rossini's Otello, Halevy's The Tempest, Gounod's Romeo
and Juliet and Thomas's Hamlet. The study aims to indicate diverse
traces of the Romantic interpretation of Shakespeare's works in the
history of the 19th-century opera. Individual chapters present the
librettos of the selected operas, analysed in the context of
Shakespeare's plays and their 19th-century reception, reconstructed
on the basis of 19th-century historic-literary texts (of, among
others, A. W. Schlegel, L. Tieck and V. Hugo), critical studies and
press articles. The analyses conducted in the book succeed in
presenting the evolution of the phenomenon of Romantic
Shakespeareanism in the 19th-century opera theatre.
Modernity between Wagner and Nietzsche analyzes the operas and
writings of Wagner in order to prove that the ideas on which they
are based contradict and falsify the values that are fundamental to
modernity. This book also analyzes the ideas that are central to
the philosophy of Nietzsche, demonstrating that the values on the
basis of which he breaks with Wagner and repudiates their common
mentor, Schopenhauer, are those fundamental to modernity. Brayton
Polka makes use of the critical distinction that Kierkegaard draws
between Christianity and Christendom. Christianity represents what
Nietzsche calls the faith that is presupposed in unconditionally
willing the truth in saying yes to life. Christendom, in contrast,
represents the bad faith of nihilism in saying no to life. Polka
then shows that Wagner, in following Schopenhauer, represents
Christendom with the demonstration in his operas that life is
nothing but death and death is nothing but life. In other words,
the purpose of the will for Wagner is to annihilate the will, since
it is only in and through death that human beings are liberated
from life as willfully sinful. Nietzsche, in contrast, is
consistent with the biblical concept that existence is created from
nothing, from nothing that is not made in the image of God, that
any claim that the will can will not to will is contradictory and
hence false. For not to will is, in truth, still to will nothing.
There is then, Nietzsche shows, no escape from the will. Either
human beings will the truth in saying yes to life as created from
nothing, or in truly willing nothing, they say no to life in
worshiping the God of Christendom who is dead.
Up-to-date, authoritative, and accessible, this is the best Mozart
opera guide available This wise and friendly guide to Mozart's
operas encompasses the full range of his most popular works-Figaro,
Don Giovanni, Cosi, Magic Flute, Seraglio, Clemenza di Tito-as well
as lesser known works like Mitridate and Il re Pastore. Music
historian Mary Hunter provides a lively introduction to each opera
for any listener who has enjoyed a performance, either on the stage
or in a video recording, and who wishes to understand the opera
more fully. The Companion includes a synopsis and commentary on
each work, as well as background information on the three main
genres in which Mozart wrote: opera seria, opera buffa, and
Singspiel. An essay on the "anatomy" of a Mozart opera points out
the musical conventions with which the composer worked and suggests
nontechnical ways to think about his musical choices. The book also
places modern productions of the operas in historical context and
explores how modern directors, producers, and conductors present
Mozart's works today. Filled with factual information and
interesting issues to ponder while watching a performance, this
guide will appeal to newcomers and seasoned opera aficionados
alike.
In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an
interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected
subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic
soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of
Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century
digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in
her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her
voice and allure have been created by technologies and media
including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the
telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted
portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors
experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in
the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial
subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological
innovation.
Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about
singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that
this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case
studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel;
Bizet's first Carmen, Celestine Galli-Marie; Massenet's muse of the
1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de
Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth
century continued to be important, but in ways that were not
conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and
creativity based on their ability to express text, act and
communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and
other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera
up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was
the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful
example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house
was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more
than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell
sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts.
He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and
performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what
they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he
composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a
period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter
in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how
Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.
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