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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
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.
Those whose thoughts of musical theatre are dominated by the
Broadway musical will find this book a revelation. From the 1850s
to the early 1930s, when urban theatres sought to mount glamorous
musical entertainment, it was to operetta that they turned. It was
a form of musical theatre that crossed national borders with ease
and was adored by audiences around the world. This collection of
essays by an array of international scholars examines the key
figures in operetta in many different countries. It offers a
critical and historical study of the widespread production of
operetta and of the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed.
Furthermore, it challenges nationalistic views of music and
approaches operetta as a cosmopolitan genre. This Cambridge
Companion contributes to a widening appreciation of the music of
operetta and a deepening knowledge of the cultural importance of
operetta around the world.
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.
Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too
often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and
Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful
roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's
first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic
historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling
evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every
opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers
the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies -
and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival
of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other
theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores
the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging
practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique
- which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration
of dance into opera.
In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage,
author Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four
female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth
century: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great.
Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological
approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest
in musical drama, as each built theaters, established drama
schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and
produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output
of the tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived,
revealing significant connections between their personal creative
aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the
political and state affairs conducted during their reigns. Through
contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the
opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative
spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of
class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical
theater productions-from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to
Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame-illuminates the transition of these royal
women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own
reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal
dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully
fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national
identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in
Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of
the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and
dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered-by triumphant
heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the
state. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the theater served
as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which they
rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and
performed on the musical stage political ambitions and
international conquests which they would later enact on the world
stage itself.
In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign
composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were
adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically
altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'.
The operas were translated into English, fitted with spoken
dialogue, divested of much of their music, augmented with
interpolations and frequently set to altered libretti. By the end
of the period, the radical changes of earlier adaptations gave way
to more faithful versions. In the first comprehensive study of
these adaptations, Christina Fuhrmann shows how integral they are
to our understanding of early nineteenth-century opera and the
transformation of London's theatrical and musical life. This book
reveals how these operas accelerated repertoire shifts in the
London theatrical world, fostered significant changes in musical
taste, revealed the ambiguities and inadequacies of copyright law
and sparked intense debate about fidelity to the original work.
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