"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.

Of their adaptation of Henry James' allusive short story, librettist Myfanwy Piper wrote that she and Britten intended to 'recreate it for a different medium.' This concept is developed further in Jane Mackay's 33 paintings: a visual reaction to the music rather than illustrations to particular scenes, occupying a unique position between abstract and figurative art. Musicologist Andrew Plant, formerly of the Britten-Pears Library, provides an introduction and commentary and there is a preface by the distinguished countertenor James Bowman. Bringing together the entire series exhibited during the 2004 Aldeburgh Festival, these paintings are occasionally John Piper-esque in their figurative elements and hints of an unseen world. Now available from Boydell & Brewer, this imaginative interpretation of Britten's The Turn of the Screw will be an essential addition to the library of all opera lovers. Limited to 300 signed and numbered copies. JANE MACKAY has broadcast widely on radio and television and has held numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Florence Biennale and London's Wigmore Hall. She is also a choral singer and oboist. ANDREW PLANT has contributed to a number of scholarly publications and was formerly Curator of Exhibitions at the Britten-Pears Library. He now teaches in Windsor and appears regularly as a recital accompanist.

Every opera lover enjoys a performance more when accompanied by a knowledgeable friend. In this indispensable guide, well-known opera critic Charles Osborne provides exactly that. Osborne fills in the details on 175 of the world's most frequently performed operas, including facts about the composer and the music, a plot outline, accounts of famous performers, and much more. "This book is exactly what the title claims: an opera lover's companion. Reading it is like going to the opera with a knowledgeable friend who tells you enough to make you want to see the piece but not so much you're drowned in superfluous detail."-Richard Fawkes, Opera Now "What this invaluable book contains is the ideal rundown on 175 operas from Auber's Fra Diavolo to Zimmerman's Die Soldaten, in each case putting the work in context within the composer's development, with a list of characters, a short synopsis and pointers towards the most imortant arias, duets and ensembles, all in a personal congenial tone, like unto an operatically wise and loving uncle."-Denby Richards, Musical Opinion "An erudite, instructive and unpretentious guide."-Michael Kennedy, The Sunday Telegraph "It's hard to imagine any other book on the subject more informative and helpful to the average enthusiast. . . . This book is one you'll cherish."-Books in Canada

Beginning with the simple question, 'Why did audiences grow silent?' "Listening in Paris" gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today. Drawing from a wide range of sources - novels, memoirs, police files, personal correspondence, newspaper reviews, architectural plans, and the like - Johnson brings the performances to life: the hubbub of eighteenth-century opera, the exuberance of Revolutionary audiences, Napoleon's musical authoritarianism, the bourgeoisie's polite consideration. He singles out the music of Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, and Beethoven as especially important in forging new ways of hearing. This book's theoretical edge will appeal to cultural and intellectual historians in many fields and periods.

With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, "Opera and Drama" outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as "The Ring of the Nibelung." Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

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.

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.

Giacomo Puccini's operas are among the most widely performed in the world, and include such masterpieces as "La Boheme", "Tosca" and "Madama Butterfly". Yet although critical studies of individual operas have appeared, very few books have examined Puccini's works as a whole from an analytical perspective. Michele Girardi remedies this lack, providing detailed analyses of all of Puccini's operas, complete with 196 musical examples. Writing in clear and lively prose accessible to scholar and passionate opera enthusiast alike, Girardi considers Puccini's musical and dramatic techniques together, demonstrating how his manipulation of dense networks of themes, sophisticated harmonic techniques and masterly orchestrations work to arouse the audience's emotions. Girardi also discusses the question of Puccini's assimilation of influences from composers as diverse as Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, Richard Strauss, Debussy and Stravinsky, showing how Puccini attempted to reconcile Italian techniques with those of European musical theatre as a whole to make Italian opera a truly international art.

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".

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.

In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann. During 1845 46 the compositional styles of Schumann and Wagner changed in a common direction, toward a style that was more contrapuntal, more densely motivic, and engaged in processes of thematic transformation. Reynolds shows that the stylistic advances that both composers made in Dresden in 1845 46 stemmed from a deepened understanding of Beethoven's techniques and strategies in the Ninth Symphony. The evidence provided by their compositions from this pivotal year and the surrounding years suggests that they discussed Beethoven's Ninth with each other in the months leading up to the performance of this work, which Wagner conducted on Palm Sunday in 1846. Two primary aspects that appear to have interested them both are Beethoven's use of counterpoint involving contrary motion and his gradual development of the Ode to Joy" melody through the preceding movements. Combining a novel examination of the historical record with careful readings of the music, Reynolds adds further layers to this argument, speculating that Wagner and Schumann may not have come to these discoveries entirely independently of each other. The trail of influences that Reynolds explores extends back to the music of Bach and ahead to Tristan and Isolde, as well as to Brahms's First Symphony.

After 50 years of analysis we are only beginning to understand the quality and complexity of Alban Berg's most important twelve-tone work, the opera Lulu. Patricia Hall's new book represents a primary contribution to that understanding-the first detailed analysis of the sketches for the opera as well as other related autograph material and previously inaccessible correspondence to Berg. In 1959, Berg's widow deposited the first of Berg's autograph manuscripts in the Austrian National Library. The complete collection of autographs for Lulu was made accessible to scholars in 1981, and a promising new phase in Lulu scholarship unfolded. Hall begins her study by examining the format and chronology of the sketches, and she demonstrates their unique potential to clarify aspects of Berg's compositional language. In each chapter Hall uses Berg's sketches to resolve a significant problem or controversy that has emerged in the study of Lulu. For example, Hall discusses the dramatic symbolism behind Berg's use of multiple roles and how these roles contribute to the large-scale structure of the opera. She also revises the commonly held view that Berg frequently invoked a free twelve-tone style. Hall's innovative work suggests important techniques for understanding not only the sketches and manuscripts of Berg but also those of other twentieth-century composers. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

"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.

'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.