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1898. With illustrations and diagrams. From the Preface: In writing the thousand and first book on Richard Wagner and his work, I do not pretend to accomplish anything better than has yet been done. My aim has been something quite different, -a real practical guide to Bayreuth for the French which will answer the needs and satisfy the curiosity of those of our nation who have not yet taken that little journey, which is so easy and attractive. I have also desired to indicate what state of mind it should be undertaken and what seductive preliminary studies are necessary to the complete enjoyment of the trip; finally, it has been my desire to present the Wagnerian style in its own proper light, by dissipating the clouds with which it has been enveloped by certain of its commentators, who, far from smoothing the way, have made it bristle with difficulties. This is the sole criticism I will allow myself: they write for Wagnerians, not for neophytes.

A complete vocal score of Somtow Sucharitkul's 2003 horror opera, "Mae Naak," edited and with a piano reduction by Trisdee na Patalung. The Nation called this opera "a truly great work" with its exotic colors and ironic cross-breeding of Thai folk music with the tropes of horror film music. As noted for its grand guignol as its sweeping lyricism, "Mae Naak" has been garnering rave reviews since its Bangkok Opera debut with Nancy Yuen in the title role.

PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITIONS: "If you are for opera, this book is for you."--"New York Times Book Review"The most influential recent book on opera criticism. . . in the English-speaking world"--"New Grove Dictionary of Opera"Affords the serious reader and listener an absorbing encounter with a sensitive and superbly trained intelligence in the act of thinking about music and music criticism. . . . We come away remembering the sound of Kerman's prose voice, mellifluous, elegant, eminently civilized, beneath its cool control a ground bass of urgent feeling."--"San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"The author's clarity and pungency...make for enjoyable, challenging reading. It is a collection that can tease the person who is primarily interested in opera into wanting to explore the song literature of the English Renaissance or to listen more knowledgeably to Mozart's piano concertos and Beethoven's symphonies."--William Ashbrook, "Opera Quarterly ""Kerman's musicological activity is technical without neglecting the importance of text, cultural context, meaning, expression, and value, and is likely to appeal to educated lay people.... Kerman's scholarship is careful and sensitive, and often subtle and witty. Yet this subtle scholarship has evoked strong and widespread reaction and provided significant leadership within musicology and beyond."--Renee Cox Lorraine, "Notes ""Lucid, lively.... Many aspects of his work can provide inspiration."--Oliver Neighbour, "Music and Letters"

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

1902. Illustrated. Contents: Ballad Opera; English Opera; Italian Opera-Max Maretzek; Italian Opera-Hackett and Ullman; Italian Opera-Strakosch and De Vivo; Italian Opera-Mapleson; German Opera; Grand Opera of Recent Years; and Opera in English.

Lakme is the daughter of Nilakantha, a fanatical Brahmin priest, who has withdrawn to a ruined temple deep in an Indian forest. In his retreat the old man nurses his wrath against the British invader, prays assiduously to Brahma (thus contributing a fascinating Oriental mood to the opening of the opera), and waits for the time to come when he shall be able to wreak his revenge on the despoilers of his country. Lakme sings Oriental duets with her slave, Mallika.

1882. This volume contains The Rhine-Gold (Das Rheingold), the prelude to Wagner's trilogy: The Nibelung's Ring. Acknowledged as the master of German opera, and one of the most progressive composers in history, his monumental cycle of four musical dramas, collectively titled Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs) and comprised of Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Die Gotterdammerung, took 22 years to complete, and stands as one of the most remarkable and influential achievements in Western music.

In the sometimes faulty and incomplete records of the American stage to which writers on musical history have hitherto been forced to repair, 1750 is set down as the natal year for English ballad opera in America. It is thought that it was in that year that "The Beggar's Opera" found its way to New York, after having, in all probability, been given by the same company of comedians in Philadelphia in the middle of the year preceding. But it is as little likely that these were the first performances of ballad operas on this side of the Atlantic as that the people of New York were oblivious of the nature of operatic music of the Italian type until Garcia's troupe came with Rossini's "Barber of Seville," in 1825.

John Hunt was born in Windsor and Graduated from University College London, in German language and literature. He has worked in personnel administration, record retailing and bibliographic research for a government agency and is on the lecture panel of the National Federation of Music Societies. In his capacity as Chairman of the Furtwangler Society UK, John Hunt has attended conventions in Rome, Paris and Zurich and has contributed to important reference works about Furtwangler by John Ardoin and Joachim Matzner. He has also translated from the German Jurgen Kesting's important monograph on Maria Callas. John Hunt has published discographies of over 80 performing artists, several of which have run into two or more editions.

1909. The author examines the following operas: Il Barbiere di Siviglia; Le Nozze di Figaro; Die Zauberflote; Don Giovanni; Fidelio; Faust; Mefistofele; La Damnation de Faust; La Traviata; Aida; Der Freischutz; Tannhauser; Tristan und Isolde; Parsifal; Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg; Lohengrin; and Hansel und Gretel.

To what extent do operas express the political and cultural ideas of their age? How do they reflect the composer's view of the changing relations among art, politics, and society? In this book John Bokina focuses on political aspects and meanings of operas from the baroque to postmodern period, showing the varied ways that operas become sensuous vehicles for the articulation of political ideas. Bokina begins with an analysis of Monteverdi's three extant operas, which address in an oblique way the political and ideological dualities of aristocratic rule in the seventeenth-century Italy. He then moves to Mozart's "Don Giovanni", which he views as a celebration of the demise of a predatory aristocracy. He presents Beethoven's "Fidelio" as an example of the political spirit of a revolution based on republican virtue, and Wagner's "Parsifal" as a utopian music drama that projects romantic anticapitalist ideals onto an imagined past. He shows that Strauss's "Elektra" and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" transform the traditional operatic depiction of madness by reflecting the emerging Freudian psychoanalysis of that era. And he argues that operas by Pfitzner, Hindemith, and Schoenberg explore the political roles of art and the artists, each couching contemporary conditions in an allegory about the fate of art in a historical period of transition. Finally, Bokina offers a reappraisal of Henze's "The Bassarids" as a political opera that confronts the promise and limits of the sensual-sexual revolt of the twentieth-century.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten's operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten's works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

Wagner's Tristan has often--even by Lichtenberger--been described as a philosophic work; and as abstract thought or philosophy, it is said, is foreign to art, a work which admits it must be condemned. Let us first understand what is meant by philosophy. It is surely a train of thought in the mind of the spectator, not in the object which he contemplates. Anything in the world may be the subject of philosophic thought, or may suggest it; there is plenty of philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about Wagner's Tristan, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in the work.

Found in this work are descriptions of the text and music of some of the most famous masterpieces. The opera is never more enjoyed than by a music lover who is incapable of criticism from lack of musical knowledge: music being first and last an emotional art; and as our emotions are refined it requires compositions of a more and more elevated character to appeal to them. The history of opera should be known and composers classified, just as it is desirable to know and to classify authors, painters, sculptors and actors. Contents: Balfe: The Bohemian Girl; Beethoven: Fidelio; Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust; Bizet: Carmen; DeKoven: Robin Hood; Flotow: Martha; Humperdinck: Hansel land Gretel; Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana; Meyerbeer: The Prophet; Mozart: The Magic Flute; Sullivan: Pinafore; Verdi: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Aida; Wagner: The Nibelung Ring, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Lohengrin.

This tremendous reference is in dictionary style for the easy reference and use by researchers, scholars, and any reader interested in the opera. It is an excellent source for looking up anything from specific data on a particular opera to which aria is connected with which opera. This volume is generously cross-referenced and should prove invaluable in answering many questions on the opera.

Imagine learning Italian through opera. L'italiano con l'opera: Lingua, cultura e conversazione is a book that can help students do just that. Designed to supplement intermediate level programs, the book is rich enough to be used in courses emphasizing language, conversation, and/or culture. Six operas are examined: Il barbiere di Siviglia, La Boheme, Pagliacci, Otello, Tosca, and La traviata. L'italiano con l'opera offers serious fun for students, familiarizing them with great operas through discussion of well-known characters, plots, settings, themes, criticism, and interpretation while they acquire vocabulary, accuracy, and fluency.

Each richly detailed opera unit contains many interactive speaking activities, reading comprehension, contemporary vocabulary, grammar, and writing activities as well as a section focusing on a specific aria or duet. Students are encouraged to tell stories, interpret characters, express and react to opinions, use appropriate vocabulary, and analyze themes using modern Italian. The book includes recommended lists of high-quality opera recordings on videocassette, DVD, audiotape, and CD. Units of study are designed to be used with excerpts from English-subtitled opera videos or DVDs.

Stock's study offers the first book-length account of Huju, a Shanghai operatic tradition which blends music and acting with portrayal of the lives of ordinary people. Richly informed by first-hand accounts, the book follows the genre as it develops in China's largest city from rural entertainment to urban ballad, revolutionary drama, and contemporary opera. An innovative combination of urban and historical ethnomusicology, the book will engage the historian of China and general scholar of music alike.

Studies in mythology and romance. Regarding Wagner and his works, so much had already been written and published, however there was one branch of the subject which could hardly be said to have received the full attention which it undoubtedly deserves. This work aims deals with the relation of Wagner's work to the literary and legendary sources upon which it is founded. It is with the hope of leading others to examine these legends for themselves that these studies were written.

This book is about the drama that takes place within the world of opera and provides an insight into how opera has evolved and functions. The Creators describes some of the ways that composers use the language of music, and liaise with their librettists. The Re-Creators explains the functions of conductors, producers, designers, repetiteurs, the chorus and orchestra, singers, the Fach system (by which voice types are categorised), understudies, and the prompter. Information is provided on Training, the Audition Process, Competitions, the Rehearsal Schedule, Opera Administration and the Audience (including its effect on the performers), as well as on the claque system, types of applause, and music critics (and their effect on the artist). Opera companies (festival, seasonal and touring), television opera and video performances are all fully explored. A final Overview explains how opera has adapted to changing social conditions from Monteverdi to the present day, and points to what the future might hold. An Interlude includes a number of humorous incidents and cautionary tales, and a comprehensive Glossary unravels the jargon of the most frequently used operatic terms.

Stephen C. Meyer details the intricate relationships between the operas Der Freischutz and Euryanthe, and contemporary discourse on both the "Germany of the imagination" and the new nation itself. In so doing, he presents excerpts from a wide range of philosophical, political, and musical writings, many of which are little known and otherwise unavailable in English. Individual chapters trace the multidimensional concept of German and "foreign" opera through the 19th century. Meyer s study of Der Freischutz places the work within the context of emerging German nationalism, and a chapter on Euryanthe addresses the opera s stylistic and topical shifts in light of changing cultural and aesthetic circumstances. As a result, Meyer argues that the search for a new German opera was not merely an aesthetic movement, but a political and social critique as well."