7 Deaths of Maria Callas is an opera project created by Marina Abramovic premiering at the Bayerische Staatsopera in Munich 2020. In collaboration with an all star creative team and through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic re-creates seven iconic deaths from Callas' most important roles throughout her career, followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' actual death played by Abramovic on stage. This book serves as a companion to the live performance and provides a behind the scenes look into the different elements that make up this conceptual and dynamic homage to the classic and iconic singer.

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.

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it-his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protege Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

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.

Opera, for its inherent multimedia nature (text, music, scenography, ballet, representation), lends itself to interdisciplinary, including those that touch upon legal topics. The stories told in the great masterpieces of European opera are, frequently, based on facts relevant for criminal law. Murders, abductions, extortions, kidnappings, massacres, and other types of crimes have filled the stories of opera since its origin. In much of musical theatre, including the masterpieces by Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Wagner, and many others,there are, also issues addressed that touch upon the less obvious areas of private law: librettos often talk about contracts, donations, wills, weddings, family relationships, debts and money issues in general. In Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Nemorino - in love with the beautiful but indifferent Adina - is the victim of a real contract scam perpetrated by Dulcamara. In La sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini, Elvino snatches the engagement ring given to Amina thinking she was unfaithful: he revokes a donation made in view of marriage, and maybe breaks a rule of law. In Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, one witnesses a sensational case of breach of contract, to be read in the light of the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a new sensibility for market economy and the increasingly central value of contracts in social relations. In Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart, there is a strange marriage vow, executed in order to guarantee the repayment of a debt.

Of all operas in the standard repertory, none has had a more complicated genesis and textual history than Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Based on a highly successful 1851 play inspired by the short stories by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the work occupied the last decade of Offenbach's life. When he died in October 1880, the work was being rehearsed at the Opera-Comique. At once cut and rearranged, the work was performed from the start in versions that ignored the composer's final intentions. Only a few decades ago, when previously unavailable manuscripts came to light, it became possible to reconstitute the score in its real form. Vincent Giroud and Michael Kaye's The Real 'Tales of Hoffmann' tells the full story for the first time in English. After discussing how the work of Hoffmann became known and influential in France, the book includes little-known sources for the opera, especially the complete Barbier and Carre play, in French and English. It describes the genesis of the opera. The annotated libretto is published in full, with the variants, for the two versions of the opera: with spoken dialogue or recitatives. Essays explain what was done to the opera after Offenbach's death, from the 1881 Opera-Comique production to more recent restoration attempts. There is also a survey of Les contes d'Hoffmann in performance from the 1970s to the present, and supplementary information, including discography, filmography, and videography. The Real 'Tales of Hoffmann' is intended to appeal to anyone interested in the work, specialists or non-specialists. Audiences, musicologists and students of French opera and opera-comique will find it of particular interest, as will opera houses, conductors, singers, directors, and dramaturgs involved in performances of the opera.