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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera

Opera Siam 2001-2018 - The First Sixty Productions (Paperback): S.P. Somtow Opera Siam 2001-2018 - The First Sixty Productions (Paperback)
S.P. Somtow; S.P. Somtow
R817 Discovery Miles 8 170 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Polovtsian Dances - Study score (Paperback, Urtext ed.): Alexander Borodin Polovtsian Dances - Study score (Paperback, Urtext ed.)
Alexander Borodin; Edited by Richard W. Sargeant
R409 Discovery Miles 4 090 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Boosey's Guide to the Opera - Containing the Plots and Incidents of All the Best Known Operas Performed in England, with... Boosey's Guide to the Opera - Containing the Plots and Incidents of All the Best Known Operas Performed in England, with Short Sketches of the Lives of the Composers (Paperback)
Alfred Scott Gatty, Nicolas Gatty
R430 Discovery Miles 4 300 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Parsifal - Die beliebtesten Opern - Die Legende um den Heiligen Gral (Paperback): Richard Wagner Parsifal - Die beliebtesten Opern - Die Legende um den Heiligen Gral (Paperback)
Richard Wagner
R130 R116 Discovery Miles 1 160 Save R14 (11%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Brecht at the Opera (Paperback): Joy H. Calico Brecht at the Opera (Paperback)
Joy H. Calico
R823 Discovery Miles 8 230 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings. Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Italy - An Operatic History (Paperback): Francis J. Clauss Italy - An Operatic History (Paperback)
Francis J. Clauss
R851 Discovery Miles 8 510 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Eugene Onegin - The Opera Lively Guides # 3 (Paperback): Luiz Gazzola Eugene Onegin - The Opera Lively Guides # 3 (Paperback)
Luiz Gazzola
R346 Discovery Miles 3 460 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Helena Citronova - libretto (Paperback): S.P. Somtow Helena Citronova - libretto (Paperback)
S.P. Somtow
R195 Discovery Miles 1 950 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber - Zerline (Paperback, Unabridged edition): Robert Ignatius Letellier Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber - Zerline (Paperback, Unabridged edition)
Robert Ignatius Letellier
R1,196 R762 Discovery Miles 7 620 Save R434 (36%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered one of the most typically French as well as one of the most successful of the opera composers of the 19th century. Although musically gifted, he initially chose commerce as a career, but soon realized that his future lay in music. He studied under Cherubini, and it was not long before his opera-comique La Bergere Chateleine (1820), written at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. Perhaps the greatest turning point in Auber's life was his meeting with the librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), with whom he developed a long and illustrious working partnership that only ended with Scribe's death. Success followed success; works such as Le Macon (1825) and La Muette de Portici (1828) brought Auber public fame and official recognition. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in 1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur.Auber seems to have been fated to live in revolutionary times; during his long life no less than four revolutions took place in France (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870). Auber's famous historical grand opera La Muette de Portici (also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) is perhaps unsurprisingly based on revolution, depicting the 1647 Neapolitan uprising against Spanish rule. It is a key work in operatic history, and has a revolutionary history itself: it was a performance of this work in Brussels in 1830 that helped spark the revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. It was a revolution that hastened Auber's death at the old age of 89. He died on 12 May 1871 as a result of a long illness aggravated by the privations and dangers of the Siege of Paris. He had refused to leave the city he had always loved, even after his house had been set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. In a twist of fate, a mark had been placed on the house of the composer of Masaniello, the very voice of Romantic liberty!Auber's overtures were once instantly recognizable, favourites of the light Classical repertoire. His gracious melodies and dance rhythms had a huge influence, both on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany. Musical tastes and fashions have changed, and contemporary audiences are more accustomed to the heavier fare of verismo, Wagnerian transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism. The operas themselves, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), are seldom performed, yet Auber's elegant, delicate and restrained art remains as appealing to the discerning listener as ever it was.Zerline, an opera in three acts with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first performed at the Academie nationale de musique (Salle de la rue Le Peletier) on 16 May 1851. The scene is set in Palermo, during the Restoration. The Prince of Roccanera, married to the sister of the King, has a supposed niece, Gemma. She is really his daughter by Zerline, an orange-seller. The latter was abducted by pirates, and having returned to Palermo after many trials, now meets her daughter, assuming the role of her aunt. She learns that Gemma loves a young naval officer, Rodolphe, but that the Prince's wife wishes Gemma to marry the King's cousin, much against the girl's wishes. In the third act, Zerline, already alerted to an intrigue compromising to the two young lovers, is able to safeguard their integrity and bring about their union.The action is better suited to a vaudeville than an opera, and the scenario has little innate interest. The role of Zerline was devised especially for the great contralto Marietta Alboni (1823-94), the first role she created. The B-flat major overture immediately establishes the family nature of the drama, with its parable of past sins, social disparity and all-conquering maternal love.There is allusion to the Sicilian setting in the two opening choruses of act 1 which are dominated by barcarolle rhythms in establishing the couleur locale. Alboni's magnificent talent added great value to the light music written by Auber for this slight canvas. The work consequently contains many pieces of a purely virtuoso nature. Among them are the grand air d'entree "O Palerme! o Sicile!", the thematically central canzonetta "Achetez mes belles oranges", and the duet for soprano and contralto "Quel trouble en mon ame" in act 1. It is as though the Italian setting of the story and the Italian origins of the prima donna caused Auber to look to his early love for Rossini, and his enduring attachment to Italian musical forms and local colour (as in Fiorella, La Muette de Portici, Fra Diavolo, Acteon, La Sirene, Zanetta and Haydee).The vocal part of Zerline is a conscious re-creation of the old Rossini mode, and her various solos are written in the style of the virtuoso contralto of the opera seria, obviously with a contemporary Gallic fleetness all Auber's own. The Grand Air demonstrates all the features.The original cast was: Merly (Roccanera); Mlle Marietta Alboni (Zerline); Mlle Maria-Dolores-Benedicta-Josephine Nau (Gemma); Aimes (Rodolphe); Mlle Dameron (the Princess of Roccanera); and Lyons (the Marquis of Bettura). The work was only performed 14 times in Paris, with no reprise. It was translated into Italian, and produced in Brussels (in French) and London (in Italian).

A Book of Operas (Paperback): The Perfect Library A Book of Operas (Paperback)
The Perfect Library; Henry Edward Krehbiel
R428 Discovery Miles 4 280 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
A Book of Operas (Paperback): Henry Edward Krehbiel A Book of Operas (Paperback)
Henry Edward Krehbiel
R258 Discovery Miles 2 580 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Tannh user - Grosse romantische Oper in drei Akten: Tannh user und Der S ngerkrieg auf Wartburg (Paperback): Richard Wagner Tannh user - Grosse romantische Oper in drei Akten: Tannh user und Der S ngerkrieg auf Wartburg (Paperback)
Richard Wagner
R127 R113 Discovery Miles 1 130 Save R14 (11%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
The Beggar's Opera - A Ballad Opera in Three Acts (Paperback): John Gay The Beggar's Opera - A Ballad Opera in Three Acts (Paperback)
John Gay
R249 Discovery Miles 2 490 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Die Zauberfloete - Die beliebtesten Opern (Paperback): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Emanuel Schikaneder Die Zauberfloete - Die beliebtesten Opern (Paperback)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Emanuel Schikaneder
R173 R156 Discovery Miles 1 560 Save R17 (10%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
The Origins of Opera (Paperback): Enrico Giovanni The Origins of Opera (Paperback)
Enrico Giovanni
R692 Discovery Miles 6 920 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Wiener Staatsoper - 348 Complete Relays (Paperback): John Hunt Wiener Staatsoper - 348 Complete Relays (Paperback)
John Hunt
R758 Discovery Miles 7 580 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Opera for the People - English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America (Hardcover): Katherine Preston Opera for the People - English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America (Hardcover)
Katherine Preston
R1,795 Discovery Miles 17 950 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

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 existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna" Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.

Sounding Libretto - Mastersingers - Richard Wagner's complete text of Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg in German and... Sounding Libretto - Mastersingers - Richard Wagner's complete text of Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg in German and English with leitmotifs, note samples, and audio samples on a free WebApp. (Paperback)
Frank Rauch
R605 Discovery Miles 6 050 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Yona - A Chamber Opera (Paperback): Robert W. Griffin Yona - A Chamber Opera (Paperback)
Robert W. Griffin
R575 Discovery Miles 5 750 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Children of many generations have been greatly impressed by the story of Yona in the belly of the whale and imagined the deep darkness of the "big fish" and the miraculous landing on safe shore. But the Book of Yona also contains a different story. The Christian, the Judaic and the Islamic narrative all show: this prophet must have been a rather stubborn man: He knew how to tell right from wrong and he was ready to bet not only his own life but the life and welfare of others on this truth. This chamber opera explores what such a strong sense of justice could have meant to his own family and the neighbors in his village. How did it affect his traveling companions on the boat when he run away from God's command and headed for Tarshish, the farthest place he could imagine? What did the people of Jerusalem, whom he warned first as a messenger of God, make of Yona? How did the people of Nineveh, who were rescued from destruction by his prophesies, see this man? While all the above people are mentioned in the traditional legends, they appear in Yona as individual characters. The story is narrated from the perspective of Yona's fictitious daughter Shachar (morning, dawn). The scenes of the opera are all set in Yona's house. The time is right after the funeral of the prophet, while his daughter is sitting the seven days of Shiva for her father.

Falstaff - Lyrical Comedy in Three Acts (Paperback): Giuseppe Verdi, W. (William) Beatty-Kingston Falstaff - Lyrical Comedy in Three Acts (Paperback)
Giuseppe Verdi, W. (William) Beatty-Kingston
R382 Discovery Miles 3 820 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
La Forza del Destino - Vocal Score (Paperback): Giuseppe Verdi La Forza del Destino - Vocal Score (Paperback)
Giuseppe Verdi
R559 Discovery Miles 5 590 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
A Six-City Opera Potpourri - Stories of Grand Opera from Cincinnati, Washington (D.C.), New York City, New Orleans, Chicago,... A Six-City Opera Potpourri - Stories of Grand Opera from Cincinnati, Washington (D.C.), New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and Central City (CO) (Paperback)
James Stubbs
R170 Discovery Miles 1 700 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Euryanthe Overture, J.291 - Study score (Paperback): Carl Maria von Weber Euryanthe Overture, J.291 - Study score (Paperback)
Carl Maria von Weber; Edited by Richard W. Sargeant
R311 Discovery Miles 3 110 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Richard to Minna Wagner - Letters to His First Wife, Volume 1 (Hardcover): Richard Wagner Richard to Minna Wagner - Letters to His First Wife, Volume 1 (Hardcover)
Richard Wagner
R1,041 Discovery Miles 10 410 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
The Standard-Operaglass - Containing the Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Twenty-Three Celebrated Operas, with Critical and... The Standard-Operaglass - Containing the Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Twenty-Three Celebrated Operas, with Critical and Biographical Remarks, Dates, Etc (Hardcover)
Charles Annesley
R1,043 Discovery Miles 10 430 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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