This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

This acclaimed edition of Scarlatti's operas is making available for the first time authentic versions of the works of one of the key figures in the history of the genre. In this fifth volume of the series, Cohn Slim provides a definitive edition of "Massimo Puppieno," an opera from the middle years of Scarlatti's career. In his introduction he discusses the opera and performance practices of the day. A translation of the libretto is included.

H. Cohn Slim is Professor of Music, University of California, Irvine.

Other operas available are "Eraclea, Marco Attilio Regolo, Griselda," and "The Faithful Princess."

Presenting a fresh approach to Mozart's achievements as a composer for the stage, John A. Rice outlines the composer's place in the operatic culture of his time. The book tells the story of how Mozart's operas came into existence, following the processes that Mozart went through as he brought his operas from commission to performance. Chapters trace the fascinating series of interactions that took place between Mozart and librettists, singers, stage designers, orchestras, and audiences. In linking the operas by topic, Rice emphasizes what Mozart's operas have in common, regardless of when he wrote them and the genres to which they belong. Overall, the book demonstrates how Mozart's entire operatic oeuvre is the product of a single extraordinary mind and a single pan-European operatic culture.

Although Verdi began sketching the music for "Il Corsaro" in 1846, a lengthy illness forced him to postpone further work. He finally completed the score in early 1848, but the revolutions of that year delayed its first performance. When it was finally premiered on 25 October at the Teatro Grande of Trieste, Verdi was in Paris and did not participate as usual in the production, which was poorly received. Though more successful in subsequent stagings, "Il Corsaro" was soon eclipsed by the operas of the noted "trilogy" and fell from the repertory. The full score of "Il Corsaro", as well as recent revivals based on pre-publication proofs of this critical edition, reveal the work to be far more rewarding than even Verdi himself would later admit. Showing the gradual consolidation of Verdi's mature style through his contacts with French opera, it amply repays the renewed attention it is receiving.

"A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. . . . This is an extraordinary examination of how opera uses the singing bodygendered and sexualto give voice to the suffering person. Highly recommended."Library Journal "The authors argument is rich and complex; it draws on source, text and music; it is also medically sound. Opera is quintessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. Hutcheon and Hutcheon enrich our understanding of both content and context."Opera News "Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera. . . . For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study."Publishers Weekly Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of, most recently, Ironys Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Michael Hutcheon, M.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. His many articles have appeared in American Review of Respiratory Disease and other journals.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehar, Emmerich Kalman, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life-one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

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 Zauberflote". 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.

"Il trovatore," the middle opera of Verdi's famous "trilogy" of the 1850s (with "Rigoletto" and "La traviata"), is the sixth work to be published in "The Works of Giuseppe Verdi," Based on Verdi's autograph score and an examination of important secondary sources including contemporary manuscript copies and performing parts, the edition identifies and resolves numerous ambiguities of harmony, melodic detail, text, and phrasing that have marred previous scores. Scholars and performers alike will find a wealth of information in the critical apparatus to inform their research and interpretations.
The lengthy introduction to the score discusses the work's genesis, sources, and performance history as well as issues of instrumental and vocal performance practice, production and staging, and problems of notation. As an added feature of the introduction is an original study by Carlos Matteo Mossa of the creation of the libretto, based on the original draft and numerous other autograph documents.

Luisa Miller, a milestone in the maturation of Verdi's style, is the fifth work to be published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. Following the strict requirements of the series, this edition is based on Verdi's autograph and other authentic sources, and has been reviewed by a distinguished editorial board--Philip Gossett (general editor), Julian Budden, Martin Chusid, Francesco Degrada, Ursula Gunter, Giorgio Pestelli, and Pierluigi Petrobelli. It is available as a two-volume set: a full orchestral score and a critical commentary. The newly set score is printed on acid-free paper and beautifully bound in an oversized format. The introduction to the score discusses the work's genesis, sources, and performance history as well as performance practice, instrumentation, and problems of notation. The critical commentary discusses editorial decisions and identifies the sources of alternate readings of the music and libretto.

An examination of the ultimate power opera grants to singing: the reversal of death. In Operatic Afterlives, Michal Grover-Friedlander examines the implications of opera's founding myth-the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: Orpheus's attempt to revive the dead Eurydice with the power of singing. Grover-Friedlander examines instances in which opera portrays an existence beyond death, a revival of the dead, or a simultaneous presence of life and death. These portrayals-in operas by Puccini and other composers and performances by Maria Callas-are made possible, she argues, by the unique treatment of voice in the operas in question: the occurrence of a breach in which singing itself takes on an afterlife in the face of the singer's death. This may arise from the multiplication of singing voices inhabiting the same body, from disembodied singing, from the merging of singing voices, from the disconnection of voice and character. The instances developed in the book take on added significance as they describe a reconfiguration of operatic singing itself. Singing reigns over text, musical language, and dramatic characterization. The notion of the afterlife of singing reveals the singularity of the voice in opera, and how much it differs categorically from any other elaboration of the voice. Grover-Friedlander's examples reflect on the meanings of the operatic voice as well as on our sense of its resonating, unending, and haunting presence. Traditionally, opera kills its protagonists, but Grover-Friedlander argues that opera at times also represents the ways that the voice, singing, or song acquire their own forms of aliveness and indestructibility. Operatic Afterlives shows the ultimate power that opera grants to singing: the reversal of death.

Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life - by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, "From the Score to the Stage" follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people - composers, librettists, designers, and technicians - as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, "From the Score to the Stage" is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.

"Bring my goat " Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess, whom he loves, has left for New York City, and he s determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment New York is a great distance from South Carolina s Catfish Row Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and leads the community in an ecstatic finale, "Oh Lawd, I m on my way."

Stephen Sondheim has called "Bring my goat " "one of the most moving moments in musical theater history." For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward the author of the seminal novella and subsequent play, Porgy, and later the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess penned this historic line. In fact, both it and "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way" were added to the play eight years earlier by that production s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of this master director.

Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, award-winning author Joseph Horowitz shows that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward's vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of suffering and redemption. Part biography, part revelatory history, "On My Way" re-creates Mamoulian's visionary style on stage and screen, his collaboration with George Gershwin, and the genesis of the opera that changed the face of American musical life."

The major historians of ancient Rome wrote their works in the firm belief that the exalted history of the Roman Empire provided plentiful lessons about individual behavior, inspiration for great souls, and warnings against evil ambitions, not to mention opportunities for rich comedy. The examples of Rome have often been resurrected for the opera stage to display the exceptional grandeur, glory, and tragedy of Roman figures. When modern opera developed in the baroque period, Rome provided settings and subject matter for librettists and composers. As opera spread to England and Germany, the treatment of Roman subjects changed to reflect national differences. In this volume, Robert C. Ketterer tracks the changes as operas' Roman subjects crossed generations and national boundaries. He also pays close attention to the composers' individual approaches to developing their librettos. Following opera from its origins in seventeenth-century Venice to Napoleon's invasion of Italy, Ketterer shows how opera was preoccupied with Roman historical figures as heroes, lovers, and fools. Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and Cimarosa were only the most renowned of the many composers drawn to Roman subjects. Handel in particular is a unifying figure in this history: he began his career in Germany, refined his craft in Italy, and rose to heights of renown in England, composing for aristocracy and royalty alike. Roman history provided these composers with all the necessary courage and intrigue, love and honor, and triumph and defeat so vital for the stirring music that makes great opera.

The John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection of the Harvard Theatre Collection is comprised of thousands of books, scores, librettos, playbills, illustrations, and ephemera relating to public performances that incorporate music and dance in an essential way. The revised and expanded edition of "The King's Theatre Collection: Ballet and Italian Opera in London, 1706-1883" has an additional 200 entries, 20 new illustrations, and several new indexes. With over 1,600 entries and 40 color illustrations, this volume provides a window into the historical significance of the King's Theatre to the cultural life of London and abroad, and will appeal to musicologists, historians, theater scholars, and librarians interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera and ballet.

Dorothea Link examines singers' voices and casting practices in late eighteenth-century Italian opera as exemplified in Vienna's court opera from 1783 to 1791. The investigation into the singers' voices proceeds on two levels: understanding the performers in terms of the vocal-dramatic categories employed in opera at the time; and creating vocal profiles for the principal singers from the music composed expressly for them. In addition, Link contextualizes the singers within the company in order to expose the court opera's casting practices. Authoritative and insightful, The Italian Opera Singers in Mozart's Vienna offers a singular look at a musical milieu and a key to addressing the performance-practice problem of how to cast the Mozart roles today.

While Puccini wrote only twelve operas during a long life--three of them one-acters designed to be performed together--he has to be ranked today as the world's most popular composer of opera. His "La Boheme" and "Tosca" are more frequently performed in the major opera houses than works by other composers, and "Madame Butterfly" and "Manon Lescaut" rank not far behind. What is the explanation for Puccini's enormous success? How do his operas work as music and drama? What was he like to contemporaries such as Verdi, Toscanini, and Caruso? Charles Osborne, author of highly successful "Complete Operas of Verdi" and "Complete Operas of Mozart, " here analyzes the entire Puccini oeuvre--from "Tosca" and "Turandot" to the less-often performed "Edgar, La Fanciulla del West, " and "La Rondine." His fourfold approach--linking biography with musical, textual, and dramatic analysis--is especially valuable for Puccini, who revealed many of his personal contradictions in his music and whose sense of detail can be appreciated by close study of the scores and characters. For the legions of Puccini lovers everywhere, this guide to his life and work can serve as an ideal reference source and opera companion.

Published in 1913, Thomas Mann's "Death in Venic"e is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. In the 1970s, Benjamin Britten adapted it into an opera, and Luchino Visconti turned it into a successful film. Reading these works from a philosophical perspective, Philip Kitcher connects the predicament of the novella's central character to Western thought's most compelling questions.

In Mann's story, the author Gustav von Aschenbach becomes captivated by an adolescent boy, first seen on the lido in Venice, the eventual site of Aschenbach's own death. Mann works through central concerns about how to live, explored with equal intensity by his German predecessors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Kitcher considers how Mann's, Britten's, and Visconti's treatments illuminate the tension between social and ethical values and an artist's sensitivity to beauty. Each work asks whether a life devoted to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of lasting achievements can be sustained and whether the breakdown of discipline undercuts its worth. Haunted by the prospect of his death, Aschenbach also helps us reflect on whether it is possible to achieve anything in full awareness of our finitude and in knowing our successes are always incomplete.

Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway's definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar's ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O'Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates "through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural," not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn's book enlightening and edifying.

Using film theory and current criticism, White traces the figure of woman in the work of Max Ophuls.

""Brecht at the Opera "is a remarkably compelling and exciting book. It not only explains why Brecht's relationship to opera is so vexed, it complicates the formulaic terms by which we have come to understand that vexation--extending, deepening, and refining our sense of the place of music in Brecht's projects as well as Brecht's place in the history of opera. It is amazingly thorough, very well written, and exceedingly provocative."--David J. Levin, author of "Unsettling Opera"
"Calico strikes a subtle balance between attentive elucidation of Brecht's theories and a less obedient exploration of the ways his achievements were grounded in an operatic tradition that he (and most later commentators) have preferred to dismiss as antiquated and irrelevant. The author offers the clearest account I have read of the concept of Gestus and--in a move that might have pleased Brecht himself quite a bit--takes on the promiscuous use of the label 'Brechtian' in recent criticism. The book's final chapter, a lively and personal meditation on what kinds of staging might really produce an effect of estrangement, is likely to become an energizing point of reference for those of us who write about opera in performance."--Mary Ann Smart, author of "Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera"
"In this first systematic, English-language study on Brecht and the opera, Joy Calico provides a carefully documented reconstruction of his lifelong engagement with the genre. The book provides a compelling argument that Brecht's modernist theater practices can be traced back to his early resistance to the emotionalized experience engendered by musical theater."--Marc Silberman, University ofWisconsin, Madison

In this title, renowned Mozart scholar Daniel Heartz brings his deep knowledge of social history, theater, and art to a study of the last and great decade of Mozart's operas. Mozart specialists will recognize some of Heartz's best-known essays here; but six pieces are new for the collection, and others have been revised and updated with little-known documents on the librettist's, composer's, and stage director's craft. All lovers of opera will value the elegance and wit of Professor Heartz's writing, enhanced by thirty-seven illustrations, many from his private collection. The volume includes Heartz's classic essay on "Idomeneo" (1781), the work that continued to inspire and sustain Mozart through his next, and final, six operas. Thomas Bauman brings his special expertise to a discussion of "Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail" (1782). The ten central chapters are devoted to the three great operas composed to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte - "Le nozze di Figaro" (l786), "Don Giovanni" (l787), and "Cosi fan tutte" (l790). The reader is treated to fresh insights on da Ponte's role as Mozart's astute and stage-wise collaborator, on the singers whose gifts helped shape each opera, and on the musical connections among the three works. Parallels are drawn with some of the greatest creative artists in other fields, such as Moliere, Watteau, and Fragonard. The world of the dance, one of Heartz's specialties, lends an illuminating perspective as well. Finally, the essays discuss the deep spirituality of Mozart's last two operas, "Die Zauberflote" and "La Clemenza di Tito" (both l79l). They also address the pertinence of opera outside Vienna at the end of the century, the fortunes and aspirations of Freemasonry in Austria, and the relation of Mozart's overtures to the dramaturgy of the operas.

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These cliches are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

The complete dramatic toolbox for the opera singer - a step-by-step guide detailing how to create character, from auditions through to rehearsal and performance and formulate a successful career. Drawing upon the innovative approach to the training of young opera singers developed by Martin Constantine, Co-Director of ENO Opera Works, The Opera Singer's Acting Toolkit leads the singer through the process of bringing the libretto and score to life in order to create character. It draws on the work of practitioners such as Stanislavski, Lecoq, Laban and Cicely Berry to introduce the singer to the tools needed to create an interior and physical life for character. The book draws on operatic repertoire from Handel through Mozart to Britten to present practical techniques and exercises to help the singer develop their own individual dramatic toolbox. The Opera Singer's Acting Toolkit features interviews with leading conductors, directors, singers and casting agents to offer invaluable insights into the professional operatic world, and advice on how to remain focused on the importance of the work itself.

'Hugely entertaining and inspiring' The Sunday Times One of The Sunday Times' 100 biographies to love The inspirational and colourful memoir of Michael Volpe, the general manager of Opera Holland Park. The son of Italian immigrants, he and his brothers were raised by his mother on a council estate in West London, before he attended Woolverstone Hall, a prestigious state boarding school designed to give bright inner city boys the opportunity of a public school education. Set against a backdrop of nuns, hit men, ice cream vans, rugby, gangsters, strict school masters and music, Noisy at the Wrong Times is the vibrant, funny, inspiring story of a boy who was given a chance - though whether he took it or not is another question... AS SEEN ON BBC ARTS' HIP HOP 2 OPERA

Every generation or so an opera singer attains the kind of public adulation and affection usually reserved for film stars or pop singers. Luciano Pavarotti reached this level of fame: he was the most celebrated tenor of all time, his concerts attended by thousands, his records selling millions of copies. In Pavarotti: My World, he talks candidly about his successes and trials, from his forays into popular music and his performances in China, to the boos he endured at La Scala, from the near-fatal illness of his youngest daughter, to his worldwide efforts to convert people to the joys of classical music and opera. Pavarotti's acclaimed autobiography shows us how this great artist felt about his extraordinary voice, how he saw his work and how he regarded his extraordinary position in the world of music and entertainment. Generously illustrated with photographs taken from Pavarotti's private collection, this is an intimate, absorbing and wonderfully honest account of an astonishing talent.