This detailed study of the earliest opera to have gained a foothold in the modern repertoire has three main sections, with contributions from experts on various aspects of the opera's history and performance.

The book begins with a historical section, in which all the known evidence about the creation and early performances of "Orfeo" is drawn together and evaluated. The first chapter recounts the story of the early Mantuan performances, with the aid of hitherto unpublished contemporary correspondence (the texts of the letters are given, in Italian and English, in an appendix). The sources of the libretto are studied in this section, and the text of the original ending of the opera is given together with an English translation. This section ends with a detailed analytical synopsis of the opera, which considers (among other points) the reasons for believing that the opera was originally staged without breaks between the acts, and the implications of this for performers and critics today.

The second section of the book includes a detailed history of the rediscovery of the opera; an influential essay on the opera by Joseph Kerman is reprinted here, together with a review by Romain Rolland of the first modern performance of "Orfeo." The final section includes essays by a conductor and a producer who have staged notable performances of the opera in recent years. They explain their approaches to the work, and offer solutions to some of the problems that it poses in performance.

This book--essential reading for all students of Monteverdi and of the early history of opera--will also enhance the enjoyment of opera-goers and record-collectors alike.

Mates shows the musical stage in all its guises--from burlesque to musical comedy to grand opera--from its beginnings in pre-Revolutionary America to the present day. He deals sensitively with the recurrent aesthetic question of popular versus highbrow art and also looks at critical reactions to popular theatrical forms of musical entertainment. He introduces the reader to various types of theatrical companies, the changing repertory, and the many kinds of musical performers who have animated the stage. Mates focuses on the creative relationships between the different forms of opera, the minstrel show and circus, melodrama and dance, burlesque, revue, vaudeville, and musical comedy.

This book is intended primarily as a guide for the opera goer. It includes a synopsis of the plot, with indications of the themes and motifs used in it, and discusses the style of the opera, Tosca being a typical example of Italian naturalism in operas, verismo. It compares Puccini's libretto with Sardou's play La Tosca, analyses the close-knit structure of the work and examines salient points in the music. It also describes the genesis of the work (quoting wherever appropriate, Puccini's own remarks about it), its first production and early reception. A subsidiary aim of the book is to present the opinions, positive and negative, that have been expressed by various critics about the opera since its first production in 1900. There are contributions from the celebrated singer and producer of Tosca Tito Gobbi, and two other musicologists, Roger Parker and William Ashbrook. Malcolm Walker has provided a discography.

Professor Kimbell's classic study illuminates the first fifteen years of Verdi's composing career, the era that culminated in his trio of masterpieces, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata. Verdi had become an acknowledged master of the peculiar brand of Romanticism that flourished in Italy in the 1830s and 40s; this background is examined in its political, social and literary light, and his consequent transformation of Italian operatic conventions is analysed. The four parts of Professor Kimbell's book range over biographical, documentary, literary and close-analytical ground. Attention is given to individual operas in order to show how Verdi assimilated and developed the Romantic tradition in his work.

The opera-goer's indispensable guide.

For seasoned opera-goers and first-time listeners alike, the definitive collection of opera stories. This guide treats opera lovers to absorbing plot summaries. John Freeman has carefully selected the works to represent the major operas performed today in the world's great houses, and he succeeds in vividly recounting the often intricate narratives. Whether used as a pre-performance refresher or a bedside companion, The Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas is an essential addition to any opera lover's library.

• Published jointly by the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Norton.

This book is a compact, up-to-date guide to the history and construction of Verdi's last - and possibly greatest - opera. Incorporating the findings of the most recent research, it provides performers, opera enthusiasts, students and scholars alike with a reliable summary of what is currently known about the work. The book gives a full synopsis of the plot and a detailed account both of Verdi's aims in composing the opera and of how he actually composed it: which portions were difficult for him, which he considered crucial, which were afterthoughts, etc. Special attention is given to separating the three versions of Falstaff that Verdi approved - versions that are still confused in almost all performances today. Professor Hepokoski also supplies extensive discussions of Boito's derivation of the plot and text from Shakespeare (and others); of the musical technique and structure of Falstaff; and of Verdi's own guidelines for interpretation, staging and singing. A guide to critical assessments of the opera illustrates the widely differing receptions the opera has had in the twentieth century, and a concluding essay by Graham Bradshaw discusses Shakespearean aspects of both Otello and Falstaff. The book contains a bibliography, a discography (by Malcolm Walker), illustrations of the original stage designs and costumes, and extensive musical examples.

This new imprint is established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press's most outstanding original monographs. These are titles that would normally appear only in hardback editions for specialists, but whose quality and general academic importance justify their special promotion in this prestige imprint. The series will include both new and recent titles drawn from the whole range of the Press's very substantial publishing programs in the humanities and social sciences, and therefore represents some of the best current scholarship in the English language.

In 1847 Wagner read the Oresteian trilogy, the finest surviving work by Aeschylus. The impact on him of Aeschylus' work, at this crucial time in his development, changed Wagner's entire vision of his own role as an artist. As he wrote in his autobiography: 'I could actually see the Oresteia with my mind's eye, as though it were actually being performed and its effect on me was indescribable. ... My ideas about the significance of drama and of the theatre were, without a doubt, moulded by these impressions ...' Wagner and Aeschylus examines the role that the Oresteia played in the shaping of the Ring, showing how Aeschylus' masterpiece influenced Wagner's at many levels, from the basic idea of using mythical material for a cycle of 'stage festival dramas' right through to profound aspects of subject matter and form and Wagner's conception of the role of music in opera. Two introductory chapters look at the overall relationship between Wagner and Aeschylus; there follows an analysis of the four dramas of the Ring: the points of affinity and the differences, between Wagner's cycle and Aeschylus' are discussed in detail, an approach which throws fresh light on the form and meaning of the Ring.

Includes explanatory essays on the opera by Gabriel Josipovici and Paul Griffiths, a detailed synopsis, an outline of the work's performance history, and a discussion of its genesis as well as a discography and bibliography.

Kat'a Kabanova is both the first Janacek opera to have been performed in Britain and the one which has received the most productions in Britain and the USA. In this book John Tyrrell brings together letters, early reviews and other documents (most of them translated from Czech for the first time) on the opera's composition and its early performances. A group of key interpretations of the opera ranges from one by the opera's German translator and Janacek's first biographer Max Brod to specially commissioned essays by Wilfrid Mellers and by David Pountney, producer of the highly successful Welsh National Opera/Scottish Opera Janacek cycle.

This book is a study of Mozart's Don Giovanni, his second opera to a libretto by da Ponte. Although it is one of the handful of best-known and most often performed operas of the last two hundred years, Don Giovanni is seldom given in an authentic form and arguments persist as to its nature. Julian Rushton takes the view that, notwithstanding the tragic nature of certain scenes, it must be regarded as an opera buffa. He gives a brief summary of its history and life in the theatre, but the chief historical essay (by Edward Forman) concerns the subject-matter before it reached da Ponte. The book includes a very detailed synopsis which forms the basis of an extended commentary on the librettist's handling of a plot constructed of both original and inherited ideas. Bernard Williams contributes an essay on Don Giovanni as an idea in literature and philosophy since Mozart. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography, and a discography of complete recordings compiled by Malcolm Walker.

This book explains how and why Gluck’s historically important and best-loved opera Orfeo came into existence, and shows why it has retained its popularity. The work is placed in its context of Gluck’s ‘reform of opera’, an artistic movement involving actors, dancers, designers, writers and philosophers, as well as musicians and librettists. Patricia Howard and her fellow contributors describe how the opera has been reinterpreted during the two hundred years between its first performance and the present day. Differing twentieth-century views based on practical experience of the work are put forward by the conductors John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Charles Mackerras, the singer Kevin Smith and the English National Opera music consultant Tom Hammond.

Originally published in 1981, this is a one-volume paperback edition of Dr von Westernhagen's distinguished biography, first published in English by Cambridge University Press as a hardcover edition in two volumes. Its distinction was that it made use of fresh archive material, and took as its starting point the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry. Dr von Westerhagen quotes extensively from letters and diaries to throw light, for example, on Wagner's estrangement from Nietzsche. The author also consulted the contents of the composer's Dresden library and teenage composition exercises written for his teacher, Theodor Weinlig, to establish early influences upon him. Particularly useful features of this study are the appendices which include a chronological summary of Wagner's life, a complete list of his musical and literary compositions and a large bibliography. This is a definitive biography which stands beside Newman's classic work as an indispensable reference book for all studies of Wagner.

Abitare la battaglia, Gabriele Baldini's study of the operas of Verdi from Oberto to Un ballo in maschera, has, since its posthumous publication in 1970, received much critical acclaim both in Italy and elsewhere. Its lack of technical language makes it easily accessible to the general music lover, but its original and sometimes controversial ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion among Verdi specialists. The book's central concern is to present an analysis of Verdi the musical dramatist, and its conclusions constitute a radical reassessment of the vexed relationship between opera and literary form, between words and music. As Julian Budden says in his foreword: 'It blows a breath of fresh air into the weary platitudes of traditional Verdian criticism.' This English translation, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi, includes some new editorial additions, bringing various factual matters into line with recent Verdi scholarship. But the book's discussion of the music is always left to speak for itself. While many of the comments may offend the purist, they are always based on a profound knowledge and love of Verdi's operatic masterpieces as seen on the stage. They rarely fail to stimulate the reader into thinking more deeply about this immensely rich repertoire.

This book was first published in hard covers in 1976 to mark the centenary of the birth of Edward J. Dent, now best remembered as translator of Mozart's opera libretti, as author of the best-known popular introductory book, Opera (Penguin) and for his book on Mozart's Operas (Oxford). He was a scholar of great range and wrote with style and wit. For many years he was professor of Music at Cambridge. Deriving from a course of previously unpublished lectures, the book concentrates on the crucial romantic period and shows how romantic opera had its origins not in Germany, as is often thought, but in the music-dramas and operas of revolutionary France and that this music was a source of nineteenth-century German symphonic style as well as of grand opera. The book is edited by Winton Dean who supplied a brief introduction and a number of notes incorporating relevant scholarship.

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.

A collection of papers on the origins of Italian opera and its influence in the development of western music.

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."

The history of women opera is a grand story. Singers and patrons, of course, but also women were composers and librettists from opera's beginnings in Renaissance Italy. At first it was exclusively for the nobility. In the 19th century, with the emergence of the middle class and the rise of nationalism, there were more public theaters and opera seemed to be everywhere. This meant more opportunities for composers, though men predominated. This book focuses on the women, from the 16th century to today, who have had successful careers in opera, many of them well known in their time.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape - on stage and beyond - which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

Leontyne Price remains one of the twentieth century's most revered opera singers and, notably, the first African American to achieve such international acclaim. In movements encompassing poetry and prose, writer and musician Kevin Simmonds explores Price as an icon, a diva, a woman, and a patriot-and himself as a fan, a budding singer, and a gay man-through passages that move polyphonically through the contested spaces of Black identity, Black sound, Black sensibility, and Black history. Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like 'weather events' and Price's forty-two-minute ovation to memories of Simmonds's coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music's greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price's profound influence on him as a person and an artist: 'That's how I hear: Her.'