Nineteenth-century Paris attracted foreign musicians like a magnet. The city boasted a range of theatres and of genres represented there, a wealth of libretti and source material for them, vocal, orchestral and choral resources, to say nothing of the set designs, scenery and costumes. All this contributed to an artistic environment that had musicians from Italian- and German-speaking states beating a path to the doors of the Academie Royale de Musique, Opera-Comique, TheActre Italien, TheActre Royal de l'Odeon and TheActre de la Renaissance. This book both tracks specific aspects of this culture, and examines stage music in Paris through the lens of one of its most important figures: Giacomo Meyerbeer. The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris. Meyerbeer's acculturation to Parisian theatrical mores is then examined, especially his moves from the Odeon and Opera-Comique to the opera house where he eventually made his greatest impact - the Academie Royale de Musique; the shift from Opera-Comique is then counterpointed by an examination of how an indigenous Parisian composer, Fromental Halevy, made exactly the same leap at more or less the same time. The book continues with the fates of other composers in Paris: Weber, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner, but concludes with the final Parisian successes that Meyerbeer lived to see - his two operas comiques.

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.

Ernst Lichtenhahn ist ohne UEbertreibung ein Doyen der schweizerischen Musikforschung. Als einer der wenigen Musikwissenschaftler im deutschsprachigen Raum hat er unterschiedliche sprachkulturelle und disziplinare Forschungstraditionen zusammengefuhrt. In seinem Wissenschaftsverstandnis sind historische und systematische Musikwissenschaft, Musikethnologie und Musikpraxis ganz im Sinne des von Guido Adler formulierten holistischen Konzepts sowohl methodisch wie auch inhaltlich immer eng aufeinander bezogen. Mit dem Titel "Communicating Music" versucht diese Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Ernst Lichtenhahn, die durch dieses Verstandnis hervortretende Vielschichtigkeit wissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen aufzugreifen und weiterzudenken. Sie versammelt Beitrage, die sich aus ganz unterschiedlichen methodischen und theoretischen Perspektiven mit Fragen nach dem diskursiven Charakter von Musik, den musikalischen Vermittlungs- und Transformationsprozessen sowie dem Sprechen uber Musik an sich auseinandersetzen. Without any exaggeration one can call Ernst Lichtenhahn a doyen of Swiss music research. As one of the few musicologists in the German-speaking sphere he has succeeded in merging different linguistic-cultural and disciplinary research traditions. In his manner of scientific understanding, historical and systematic musicology, ethnomusicology and music practice are methodologically and topically related closely to each other, entirely consistent with the holistic concept of music research as developed by Guido Adler. With the title "Communicating Music", this Festschrift for Ernst Lichtenhahn's 80 birthday attempts to take up and to further develop the diversity of scientific issues as emerged through such an understanding. It collects papers that come from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives to deal with issues about the discursive nature of music, about mediation and transformation processes of music as well as about the discourse on music itself.

Grand palaces of culture, opera theaters marked the center of European cities like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. As opera cast its spell, almost every European city and society aspired to have its own opera house, and dozens of new theaters were constructed in the course of the "long" nineteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, only a few, mostly royal, opera theaters, existed in Europe. However, by the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly every large town possessed a theater in which operas were performed, especially in Central Europe, the region upon which this book concentrates.
This volume, a revised and extended version of two well-reviewed books published in German and Czech, explores the social and political background to this "opera mania" in nineteenth century Central Europe. After tracing the major trends in the opera history of the period, including the emergence of national genres of opera and its various social functions and cultural meanings, the author contrasts the histories of the major houses in Dresden (a court theater), Lemberg (a theater built and sponsored by aristocrats), and Prague (a civic institution). Beyond the operatic institutions and their key stage productions, composers such as Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner, Bedrich Smetana, Stanislaw Moniuszko, Antonin Dvorak, and Richard Strauss are put in their social and political contexts. The concluding chapter, bringing together the different leitmotifs of social and cultural history explored in the rest of the book, explains the specificities of opera life in Central Europe within a wider European and global framework.

Verdi's "Attila", his ninth opera, had its premiere at Venice's Teatro La Fenice in March 1846. Based on the German play Attila, King of the Huns, the libretto has its own storied history: as Verdi fell seriously ill before the work's completion, the main librettist moved permanently to Madrid, leaving the last act of Attila only a sketch. It was then that Verdi called upon Francesco Maria Piave, the librettist for two of his earlier works, who at the composer's behest scratched plans for a large choral finale and decided instead to concentrate on the dramatic roles of the protagonists. In the years since Attila has become one of Verdi's most popular and oftstaged early works. The composer's inimitable vitality, soaring arcs of melody, grand choruses, and passion are here amply apparent. This critical edition, based on Verdi's autograph full score preserved at the British Library, restores the opera's original text and accurately reflects the composer's colorful and elaborate musical setting, while Helen Greenwald's masterly introduction discusses the opera's origins, sources, and performance questions, and her critical commentary details editorial problems and their solutions.

Vocal Victories is the first musicological comparison of all of Richard Wagner's great female characters, from Senta in The Flying Dutchman to Kundry in Parsifal. It has long been customary to view these and other opera heroines as victims, because these women, as a rule, perish during the plot of the opera. A closer study of the music of the women - their singing and the orchestral voices that surround them - reveals, however, that it is in the female characters that the new and groundbreaking musical material comes into being, and that the women are far more in command of the development of the works. Vocal Victories claims that Wagner was far ahead of his time in terms of equality between the sexes, and the musicological analyses are supported by quotations from the composer's own writings, so that a picture of Wagner as a radical critic of the oppressive patriarchal society emerges clearly and unmistakably. The feminist approach to the material also provides an opportunity for new

Long before Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, long before Barthes explicated his empire of signs, even before Puccini's Madame Butterfly, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado presented its own distinctive version of Japan. Set in a fictional town called Titipu and populated by characters named Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, and Pooh-Bah, the opera has remained popular since its premiere in 1885. Tracing the history of The Mikado's performances from Victorian times to the present, Josephine Lee reveals the continuing viability of the play's surprisingly complex racial dynamics as they have been adapted to different times and settings. Lee connects yellowface performance to blackface minstrelsy, showing how productions of the 1938-39 Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado, among others, were used to promote African American racial uplift. She also looks at a host of contemporary productions and adaptations, including Mike Leigh's film Topsy-Turvy and performances of The Mikado in Japan, to reflect on anxieties about race as they are articulated through new visions of the town of Titipu. The Mikado creates racial fantasies, draws audience members into them, and deftly weaves them into cultural memory. For countless people who had never been to Japan, The Mikado served as the basis for imagining what "Japanese" was.

Chicago's love affair with opera began early, in 1850, when the frontier town welcomed its first traveling opera singers. A full house applauded the opening performance, but during a repeat performance the next day, the theater burned to the ground. Nonetheless, Chicago had been bitten by the opera bug, and it has never lost its enthusiasm for the art. More than sixty years-and many visiting opera companies-would pass before the city established an opera company of its own. Robert Marsh recounts the trials and triumphs of the entrepreneurs and the colorful international artists who brought opera to Chicago and staged it in a number of different theaters. In the first half of the twentieth century, seven opera companies were started in Chicago-and failed. Finally, in 1954, three friends launched the company that became Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the city gained a company that not only thrived but earned recognition as one of the nation's great cultural institutions. This book also details the history and fortunes of the Chicago Opera Theater from its inception in 1974 to the present. Singers, musicians, enterprising impresarios, richly decorated opera houses, and performances that held audiences spellbound all figure into Marsh's lively account of opera in Chicago. The story also provides an overview of changes in the operatic repertoire, audience development, and approaches to production as opera grew from a "stand-and-sing" event to its full flowering as enriching musical drama. Enlivened with nearly a hundred illustrations, 150 Years of Opera in Chicago embraces its subject enthusiastically. This broad and engaging overview is supplemented with a list of professional opera performances in Chicago, from 1850 to 2005.

Opera developed during a time when the position of women--their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality--was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts--by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus--form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

During the middle phase of his career, 1849-59, Verdi adopted new compositional procedures to create some of his best-loved and most-performed works. Focusing on the operas he composed during this period, this volume explores Verdi's work from three interlinked perspectives: studies of the original source material, cross-disciplinary analyses of musical and textual issues, and the relationship of performance practice to Verdi's musical and dramatic conception.
In addition to offering new insights into such staples as "Il trovatore," "La traviata," and "Un ballo in maschera," "Verdi's Middle Period" also highlights works which have only recently begun to re-enter public consciousness, such as "Stiffelio," as well as lesser-known works such as "Luisa Miller" and "Les Vepres siciliennes," Comprising major essays by some of the best-known Verdians of our day, as well as articles from up-and-coming scholars, this volume has much to offer readers ranging from musicologists to serious opera buffs.
Contributors are Martin Chusid, Markus Engelhardt, Linda B. Fairtile, Philip Gossett, Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, Elizabeth Hudson, James Hepokoski, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Carlo Matteo Mossa, Roger Parker, Harold S. Powers, David Rosen, and Mary Ann Smart.

Since the release of Wayne Koestenbaum's book, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, gender studies has begun to take an active interest in music. Opera, long viewed as strictly an establishment tradition, has in particular been given a second look by gender theorists. Can opera - an antiquated, Eurocentric bastion of high culture - in fact be subverting patriarchal authority in some fundamental way?

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.

For anyone who has been intimidated, overwhelmed, or just plain confused by what they think opera is, Who's Afraid of Opera? offers a lively, readable, and frankly biased guide to what author Michael Walsh describes as "the greatest art form yet invented by humankind". From opera's origins in Renaissance Italy to the Who's Tommy and Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, Walsh explores what opera is - and what it's not; which is more important - the words or the music?; why does it take Tristan so long to die?; a (Not Quite) Totally Arbitrary Basic Repertoire; and what makes a great singer. So curtain up! It's time to settle into your seat, close up your program, and watch the house lights go down. And get ready for the musical ride of your lives.

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.

"Of the greatest significance ...The first volume of George Perle's two volume study on the two operas of Alban Berg ...is one of those few works of scholarship and analysis you can label 'definitive'; it may in time be supplemented, but not superseded."--Richard Dyer, Boston Sunday Globe "It is difficult to see how Professor Perle's exhaustive study can ever be superseded...or how such future work as may appear can do anything but add new details to his exposition of the basic clements of the work's musical language...After twenty years' work on the composer he brings to this study of Wozzeck not only a penetrating analytical mind, great scholarship and a comprehensive knowledge of the music but an almost uncanny insight into what seem to be the inner workings of Berg's mind."--Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters "If you have ever had any questions about Berg's opera Wozzeck, Mr. Perle probably answers them for you in The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume One/Wozzeck...An indispensable work on Berg's life as reflected in his work." --Donal Hcnahan, The New York Times "As with Perle's previous books, one notes with pleasure how well written is this one, how simultaneously economical and comfortable the prose, even when the subject is as complex and manifold as Wozzeck."--Mark DeVoto, Music Library Association Notes "A great and unique contribution ...[Perle] is a leading authority on Berg, and his analysis of Berg's compositional methods in the two operas is likely to be definitive."--George Martin, The Opera Quarterly "George Perle has contributed more than anyone of any nationality to a true understanding of Berg's music."--Douglass Green, Journal of Music Theory "George Perle ...possesses the kind of complete credential required for this study. [Volume I: Wozzeck] is a model of scholarly writing. Every paragraph, each quoted music example, each analysis moves the argument forward in a clear incisive manner ...Essential reading for the serious student of the music of Alban Berg."--Choice

"The first volume of Perle's magnificent study focused on Wozuck ...Its successor, equally painstaking and perceptive, is if anything more invaluable, for the clouds of mystery around Berg's second opera are only now beginning to disperse, and the work is coming to be regarded properly as the climax of the composer's achievement." (Andrew Clements, Opera). "Perle's books have laid the groundwork for a thorough exploration of the remarkably successful ways in which Berg was able to marry a powerful intellectual grasp of a richly developing language to an instinctive feel for dramatic shape, a process that marks him out as one of the few genuine opera composers this century." (Michael Taylor, Music and Letters). "The first volume, Wozzeck ...was universally recognized as being a work of outstanding scholarship. The Lulu volume is an even more impressive achievement. In its analytical sophistication, its critical insights and in the implications which it has for our understanding not only of Berg but of a whole body of post-diatonic music, Perle's Lulu is one of the most exciting and important books on music to appear for many years." (Douglas Jarman, Times Literary Supplement). "With the second of his books on The Operas of Alban Berg, this American musicologist and composer has now taken advantage of all this new material to consolidate his own research and present us with the most sophisticated musical analysis yet made of the composer ...As Perle shows, Lulu represents the highest point of development in Berg's music from the point of view of ambiguity of fabrication." (Stephen Reeve, Classical Music). "Nothing I've read in the past year makes as important a contribution to this literature as The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume Two: Lulu ...Perle's saga of the opera's release from partial captivity reads like one of the great intellectual detective stories of our era ...What emerges most flavorfully is Perle's portrait of a haunted artist who imbued his later works with concealed autobiographical gestures, including his longtime love affair with a Prague matron." (Ailan Ulrich, San Francisco Focus). "The goal of the two-volume work is not merely to dwell in detail on the operas themselves, but to give some account of Berg's other music, in order to set the operas in the context of his complete output. With a composer like Berg, whose music is intimately bound up with his own personal life, such an approach is particularly appropriate ...George Perle has given the world two volumes which will remain at the top of their field for many years to come." (Douglass M. Green, Journal of the American Musicological Society).

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.

Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general. Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions - musical, dramatic, practical - that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.