"Walsh's book should be a "vade mecum" for anyone who would teach the "Carmina Burana" on any level and be of considerable value in general to medievalists, comparatists, and those in related disciplines."--"New England Classical Newsletter and Journal"
"Teachers, students, and any reader interested in medieval lyric will find this volume a clear and useful approach to intrinsically interesting texts."--"Renaissance Quarterly"
"The most scholarly and most helpful presentation of a group of these captivating lyrics that has yet appeared in English."--Peter Dronke, University of Cambridge
"A superb volume, fully worthy of these famous but often misunderstood poems. P. G. Walsh's unmatched erudition in Latin literature furnishes lucid grammatical explanations, incisive analysis of goliardic literary values and technique, and illuminating references to ancient and medieval parallels. His prose translations make the poems accessible also to those with little or no Latin."--Janet M. Martin, Princeton University

Robert Donington, the noted musicologist, performer, and writer, is famous for his influential and provocative book Wagner's "Ring" and Its Symbols, and for his indispensable reference work The Interpretation of Early Music. In this book he discusses the workings of symbolism in opera and the importance of staging opera in keeping with the composer's intentions. Only in this way, says Donington, can we be faithful to the conscious or unconscious symbolism invested in the work by the composer and librettist. Starting form Carlyle's premise that "it is through symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works and has his being," Donington interprets scenes and characters from operas by Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, Puccini, Debussy, Strauss, Stravinsky, Berg, Britten, Tippett, and other composers. Time and again Donington sheds new light on operatic situations that are problematic or have become over-familiar. His lively and wide-ranging work reveals a deep knowledge and love of opera, combined with a rare insight into hidden meanings to be found in music, words, and action.

Despite the voluminous literature on Wagner's operas, little has been published that does justice to all the elements of their performance. This book, addressed to both specialists and the opera-going public, brings together a team of authorities from around the world to examine the performance history and reception of Wagner's works in Europe and America. Essays on conducting, singing, production, and stage design of Wagner's works explore the revolutionary nature of the composer's demands on his interpreters. The book raises profound aesthetic questions about the realization of opera on the stage: the authority of the composer vis-a-vis the director and the audience; the sanctity of the text, score and stage directions; and the role of art itself in society. These issues are discussed both theoretically and, referring to specific productions, in terms of their practical consequences. The volume also considers the explosion in popularity of Wagner's music dramas and their ability to assume new meanings - on stage and in recordings - for successive generations.It looks at the often vociferous debate over vocal and conducting styles, at the origins of Bayreuth, and at the impact of Wagner on the musical life of New York and Vienna. The book is certain to raise the level of discussion about opera production generally and to enhance our enjoyment of Wagner's works in the opera house. Barry Millington is author of the Vintage Master Musicans volume on Wagner. Stewart Spencer is editor of 'Wagner', the journal of the Wagner Society. Together they have edited the 'Selected Letters of Richard Wagner'.

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas cultural, social, and personal associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

Is "passion" too strong a word to describe what drives people to stand outdoors for a dozen hours or more, regardless of the weather, to purchase fold-out seats behind the upper-tier boxes for a performance of Tristan und Isolde? Not at all, says Michel Poizat, who here guides his readers on a voyage to discover why opera rewards its devotees with such profound pleasure, mingled with equally powerful feelings of horror and loss. His fascinating book, first published in French in 1986, is now available in Arthur Denner's fluid and sensitive English translation. Predictably, Poizat's route is not at all a conventional one. Rather than taking as his point of departure the intentions of composers and librettists, he is primarily concerned with the expectations and desires of the audience. He reports on an informal group interview with overnight standees on the Paris Opera House steps as they compare notes on how opera became an addiction. They are there for a "fix", they agree. How, Poizat asks, does this "monstrous phenomenon", which stretches its interpreters to their absolute limits, captivate its audience, making them oblivious of hard seats or overheated halls and eliciting copious and unashamed tears? Poizat sees the history of opera in terms of the evolution of the voice from song to cry, from verbal expressions of emotion to such wordless outbursts as Lulu's final scream at the end of Alban Berg's opera. Calling on the insights and methods of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he distinguishes mere pleasure from jouissance--pleasure being the joy experienced when one's expectations are satisfied, and jouissance, the climactic high beyond self-control. For Poizat, the quarrel between Gluckistsand Piccinists, the disputes among composers as to which is more important, "le parole" or "la musica", become examples that demonstrate or underscore the differences between pleasure and jouissance. What is the sound of the angel's cry? Poizat believes that the voice-object stands for that which is irrevocably lost. Hence our fascination with castrati, whose voice-type will never again be heard. He discusses the role of this high, sexless "angel" voice in the Mozarabic church, as well as the gender confusions of baroque opera and the shift, originating with Mozart, of the angel-voice from male to female performers. Startling in its observations, The Angel's Cry is both daring and playful. It will surprise and delight any opera aficionado, and other lovers of music will also find it wonderfully enlightening.

Introduces the uninitiated to the mysteries of opera and helps more experienced buffs expand their understanding and deepen their appreciation of the art form.

Provides information on the music, libretto, and major roles of operas and music theater works by more that one hundred modern American composers, and includes selections from reviews of each work.

The Center for Creative Leadership's continuing studies of executives have found that learning on the job is the best way for a person to develop. Often people are given new positions in order to provide them with developmental experiences. But what if such a transfer is not possible? This report contains eighty-eight assignments that offer individual development opportunities on a current job.

Opera and Ideas is a study of the connections between music and intellectual history. Through lucid analysis of six operas and two song cycles, Paul Robinson shows how operas give musical and dramatic expression to ideas about the self, society, and history.

To its devotees, opera is the most sublime of arts. It is also one of the most accident prone, and when things go wrong, they tend to do so on a grand scale. "Great Operatic Disasters" records some of the most memorable calamities from opera houses around the world. Most of them are true, some have been embroidered over the years, and a few, well, "se non e vero, e ben trovato."

For listeners to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of "The Metropolitan Opera", Boris Goldovsky's cheery 'Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen!' has always heralded a quarter hour of pure enjoyment. Since 1946, Goldovsky has been treating the Met's radio audiences to his scholarly observations and personal reminiscences. Twenty six of his intermission scripts have been included in this book, including "Aida", "Carmen", "The Magic Flute", and "Tosca".

From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera:". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received. As such, the production and its attendant symposium made a positive contribution to the cause of Baroque opera . . . . "Baroque opera experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Its popularity, however, has given rise to a number of perplexing and exciting questions regarding literary sources, librettos, theater design, set design, stage movement, and costumes-even the editing of the operas. In 1980, the Dallas Opera produced the American premier of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso, which met with much acclaim. Concurrently an international symposium on the subject of Baroque opera was held at Southern Methodist University. Authorities from around the world met to discuss the operatic works of Vivaldi, Handel, and other Baroque composers as well as the characteristics of the genre. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk, deputy chair and chair of the symposium, edited the papers to produce this groundbreaking study, which will be of great interest to music scholars and opera lovers throughout the world. Contributors to Opera and Vivaldi include Shirley Wynne, John Walter Hill, Andrew Porter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Howard Mayer Brown, William Holmes, Ellen Rosand, and the editors.

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.

Richard Wagner's vast Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle comprises four full-length operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung) and is arguably the most extraordinary achievement in the history of opera. His own libretto to the operas, translated by Andrew Porter, is an intricate system of metric patterns, imaginative metaphors and alliteration, combining to produce the music in text.

Based on Dr. Lang s experience as music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, this book preserves the immediate reactions of a working reviewer, his on-the-spot responses to the actual experience of theatrical productions, spanning the active repertory from Gluck to the present day. It is at once an introduction to the art of opera and a rich repository of perceptions about the changing nature and esthetics of the musical theater. All of the major composers are discussed: Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Strauss, Berg, and Stravinsky. There are also chapters on opera buffa, verismo, French opera, Russian opera, American opera, operetta, opera in English, and opera in concert form."

'In this highly readable biography of Nellie Melba...Robert Wainwright tells the story of the girl with the incredible voice who, by sheer force of her personality and power of her decibels, took the operatic world by storm and managed to escape from her violent husband' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, DAILY MAIL Nellie Melba is remembered as a squarish, late middle-aged woman dressed in furs and large hats, an imperious Dame whose voice ruled the world for three decades and inspired a peach and raspberry dessert. But to succeed, she had to battle social expectations and misogyny that would have preferred she stay a housewife in outback Queensland rather than parade herself on stage. She endured the violence of a bad marriage, was denied by scandal a true love with the would-be King of France, and suffered for more than a decade the loss of her only son - stolen by his angry, vengeful father. Despite these obstacles, she built and maintained a career as an opera singer and businesswoman on three continents which made her one of the first international superstars. Award-winning biographer Robert Wainwright presents a very different portrait of this great diva, one that celebrates both her musical contributions and her rich and colourful personal life.

Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. "Divas and Scholars" is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett's personal experiences of triumphant--and even failed--performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas.
Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design.
Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrallboth aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it--in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.

In this groundbreaking survey of the fundamentals, methods, and formulas that were taught at Italian music conservatories during the 19th century, Nicholas Baragwanath explores the compositional significance of tradition in Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Boito, and, most importantly, Puccini. Taking account of some 400 primary sources, Baragwanath explains the varying theories and practices of the period in light of current theoretical and analytical conceptions of this music. The Italian Traditions and Puccini offers a guide to an informed interpretation and appreciation of Italian opera by underscoring the proximity of archaic traditions to the music of Puccini.

"Giovanna d'Arco" (Joan of Arc), Verdi's seventh opera, premiered at La Scala in 1845 to great public success despite sub-par production standards, and modern performances have swept away both audiences and critical reservations when the work is executed with faithfulness to his score. At the heart of this large-scale opera, with its prominent choruses, is the difficult and beautiful part of Joan--simultaneously ethereal soprano and dynamic warrior. The libretto by Temistocle Solera, based in part on Schiller's play "Die Jungfrau von Orleans," omits Joan's trial for heresy and burning at the stake, ending instead with an offstage battle in which she is mortally wounded leading the French to victory against the English.
This critical edition of "Giovanna d'Arco," the first publication in full score, is based on the composer's autograph score preserved in the archives of Verdi's publisher, Casa Ricordi. It restores the opera's original text, which had been heavily censored, and accurately reflects Verdi's colorful and elaborate musical setting. Editor Alberto Rizzuti's introduction discusses the opera's origins, sources, and performance questions, while the critical commentary details editorial problems and solutions.

The performance history of Stiffelio as Verdi envisioned it began only in 1993. Composed with Rigoletto, and sharing many of its characteristics, Stiffelio suffered from the censors' strictures. From its premiere in 1850, its text was diluted to appease the authorities, making a mockery of the action and Verdi's carefully calibrated music. The story of Stiffelio, a protestant minister who eventually divorces his adulterous wife but forgives her from the pulpit in the final scene, shocked conservative Italian religious and political powers. The libretto was rewritten for subsequent revivals, and even some music was dropped. In 1856 the composer angrily withdrew Stiffelio from circulation, reusing parts of the score for his Aroldo. The rest was later presumed lost. Not until 1992 was it revealed that Verdi's heirs possessed not only most of the canceled score, but also sixty pages of sketches for Stiffelio. These were used for the preliminary score of the critical edition, premiered in 1993 at New York's Metropolitan Opera. It was the first time Stiffelio was performed as Verdi wrote it. It has been enthusiastically received around the world. With the publication of the critical edition, the first in full orchestral score, Stiffelio should take its rightful place in the Verdi canon.

Donald Grout's widely praised edition of the work of a key figure in the history of opera provides the most reliable version of the score for each opera, appending a translation of the libretto. These volumes are "at once practical and unquestionably scholarly" in the words of Opera Journal. A tale of love and honor in the "opera seria" tradition, "Tigrane" was first performed at Naples in 1715. This edition of it will please performance groups and music historians alike.

Donald Jay Grout is Given Foundation Professor of Musicology Emeritus, Cornell University; Michael Coffins is Professor of Music, North Texas State University.

Operas already available: "Eraclea, Marco Attilia Regolo, Griselda, The Faithful Princess, Massimo Puppieno, La Caduta de' Decemviri, and Gli Equivoci nel Sernbiante."

Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni's story the only one-or even the most interesting one-in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it's Mozart's men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist's point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It's time to give Mozart's women-and Mozart's multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character-their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart's four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and Die Zauberfloete. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero's narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart's women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts-past and current-influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.