Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012-2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera's expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.

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 this book on Richard Wagner's compelling but enigmatic masterpiece Goetterdammerung, the final opera of his monumental Ring tetralogy, Alexander H. Shapiro advances an ambitious new interpretation which uncovers intriguing new facets to the work's profound insights into the human condition. By taking a fresh look at the philosophical and historical influences on Wagner, and critically reevaluating the composer's intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters, and diary entries, the book challenges a number of conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning. The book argues that Goetterdammerung, and hence the Ring as a whole, achieves coherence when interpreted in terms of contemporary nineteenth-century theories of progress, and, in particular, G.W.F. Hegel's philosophies of mind and history. A central target of the book is the article of faith that has come to dominate Wagner scholarship over the years - that Wagner's encounter in 1854 with Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy conclusively altered the final message of the Ring from one of historical optimism to existential pessimism. The author contends that Schopenhauer's uncompromising denigration of the will and denial of the possibility for human progress find no place in the written text of the Ring or in a plausible reading of the final musical setting. In its place, the author discovers in the famous Immolation Scene a celebration of mankind's inexhaustible capacity for self-improvement and progress. The author makes the further compelling case that this message of progress is communicated not through Siegfried, the traditional male hero of the drama, but through Brunnhilde, the warrior goddess who becomes a mortal woman. In her role as a battle-tested world-historical prophet she is the true revolutionary change agent of Wagner's opera who has the strength and vision to comprehend and thereby shape human history. This highly lucid and accessible study is aimed not only at scholars and researchers in the fields of opera studies, music and philosophy, and music history, but also Wagner enthusiasts, and readers and students interested in the history and philosophy of the nineteenth century.

Opera has been around ever since the late 16th century, and it is still going strong in the sense that operas are performed around the world at present, and known by infinitely more persons than just those who attend performances. On the other hand, it has enjoyed periods in the past when more operas were produced to greater acclaim. Those periods inevitably have pride of place in this Historical Dictionary of Opera, as do exceptional singers, and others who combine to fashion the opera, whether or not they appear on stage. But this volume looks even further afield, considering the cities which were and still are opera centers, literary works which were turned into librettos, and types of pieces and genres. While some of the former can be found on the web or in other sources, most of the latter cannot and it is impossible to have the whole picture without them. Indeed, this book has an amazingly broad scope. The dictionary section, with about 340 entries, covers the topics mentioned above but obviously focuses most on composers, not just the likes of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, but others who are scarcely remembered but made notable contributions. Of course, there are the divas, but others singers as well, and some of the most familiar operas, Don Giovanni, Tosca and more. Technical terms also abound, and reference to different genres, from antimasque to zarzuela. Since opera has been around so long, the chronology is rather lengthy, since it has a lot of ground to cover, and the introduction sets the scene for the rest. This book should not be an end but rather a beginning, so it has a substantial bibliography for readers seeking more specific or specialized works. It is an excellent access point for readers interested in opera.

The author of the book analyses selected 19th-century operas based on Shakespeare's plays from the perspective of their relations to the literature, aesthetics and philosophy of the Romantic period. The texts discussed here include Verdi's Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, Rossini's Otello, Halevy's The Tempest, Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Thomas's Hamlet. The study aims to indicate diverse traces of the Romantic interpretation of Shakespeare's works in the history of the 19th-century opera. Individual chapters present the librettos of the selected operas, analysed in the context of Shakespeare's plays and their 19th-century reception, reconstructed on the basis of 19th-century historic-literary texts (of, among others, A. W. Schlegel, L. Tieck and V. Hugo), critical studies and press articles. The analyses conducted in the book succeed in presenting the evolution of the phenomenon of Romantic Shakespeareanism in the 19th-century opera theatre.

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.

A mesmerizing figure in concert, Charles Munch was celebrated for his electrifying public performances. He was a pioneer in many arenas of classical music--establishing Berlioz in the canon, perfecting the orchestral work of Debussy and Ravel, and leading the world to Roussel, Honegger, and Dutilleux. A pivotal figure, his accomplishments put him on a par with Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein.
In Charles Munch, D. Kern Holoman provides the first full biography of this giant of twentieth-century music, tracing his dramatic survival in occupied Paris, his triumphant arrival at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his later years, when he was a leading cultural figure in the United States, a man known and admired by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. He turned to conducting only in middle age, after two decades as a violinist and concertmaster, a background which gave him special insight into the relationship between conductor and orchestra. At the podium, his bond with his musicians unleashed something in them and in himself. "A certain magic took wing that amounts to the very essence of music in concert," the author writes, as if "public performance loosed the facets of character and artistry and poetry otherwise muffled by his timidity and simple disinclination to say much." In concert, Munch was arresting, even seductive, sweeping his baton in an enormous arch from above his head down to his knee. Yet as Holoman shows, he remained a lonely, even sad figure, a widower with no children, a man who fled admirers and avoided reporters.
With groundbreaking research and sensitive, lyrical writing, Charles Munch penetrates the enigma to capture this elusive musical titan.

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.

Responding to the ever-increasing popularity and international performances of operas by the Czech composer Leo? Janacek, this volume, the first in the Janacek Opera Libretti Series, is the full translation of The Cunning Little Vixen in English alongside the original Czech. This work meets the needs of English-speaking singers, conductors, coaches, and stage directors and conveniently provides idiomatic and word-for-word translations, including translations of stage and musical directions. In addition, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used to indicate Czech pronunciation, following the clearly-presented method given in the author's book Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire, with a foreword by Sir Charles Mackerras. Cheek also provides practical notes about Janacek's style, both in general terms and specific issues relating to this opera along with a plot summary with translations and vocal ranges of characters and the pronunciation of their names. This entire volume is organized in a clear, readable format, resulting in a book that will help to make productions of The Cunning Little Vixen in the original Czech much easier a task than ever before.

English Dramatick Opera, 1661-1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Andrew Walkling argues that, while the musical elements of this form are crucial to its definition and history, the origins of the genre lie principally in a tradition of spectacular stagecraft that first manifested itself in England in the mid-1660s as part of a hitherto unidentified dramatic sub-genre, to which Walkling gives the name "spectacle-tragedy". Armed with this new understanding, the book explores a number of historical and interpretive issues, including the physical and rhetorical configurations of performative spectacle, the administrative maneuverings of the two "patent" theatre companies, the construction and deployment of the technologically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre in 1670-71, the critical response to generic, technical, and ideological developments in Restoration drama, and the shifting balance between machine spectacle and song-and-dance entertainment throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, including in the dramatick operas of Henry Purcell. This study combines the materials and methodologies of music history, theatre history, literary studies, and bibliography to fashion an entirely new approach to the history of spectacular and musical drama on the English Restoration stage. This book serves as a companion to the Routledge publication Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 (2017).

Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688-89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which a limited amount of documentation survives, Walkling argues that our understanding of the distinctions between masque and opera must be premised upon a thorough knowledge of theatrical context and performance circumstances. Using extensive archival and literary evidence, detailed textual readings, rigorous tabular analysis, and meticulous collation of bibliographical and musical sources, this interdisciplinary study offers a host of new insights into a body of work that has long been of interest to musicologists, theatre historians, literary scholars and historians of Restoration court and political culture, but which has hitherto been imperfectly understood. A companion volume will explore the phenomenon of "dramatick opera" and its precursors on London's public stages between the early 1660s and the first decade of the eighteenth century.

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was Victorian Britain's most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan's reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for scholarly re-engagement with Sullivan. The present book offers a new appraisal of the music of this most notable nineteenth-century British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social context to his work. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most important serious works - the music to The Tempest, the 'Irish' Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe - alongside detailed examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S. Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan's musical achievement.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about German national theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics, state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and national identity in theater further transformed in response to the crisis of Emperor Joseph II's reform movement, the revolutionary ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals in theatrical performances through the institution of theater censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic works (such as Die Zauberfloete and Fidelio) that eventually became the cornerstones for later developments of German culture.

Opera has been performed in Australia for more than two hundred years, yet none of the operas written before the Second World War have become part of the repertoire. It is only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that there is evidence of the successful systematic production of indigenous opera. The premiere of Voss by Richard Meale and David Malouf in 1986 was a watershed in the staging and reception of new opera, and there has been a diverse series of new works staged in the last thirty years, not only by the national company, but also by thriving regional institutions. The emergence of a thriving operatic tradition in contemporary Australia is inextricably enmeshed in Australian cultural consciousness and issues of national identity. In this study of eighteen representative contemporary operas, Michael Halliwell elucidates the ways in which the operas reflect and engage with the issues facing contemporary Australians. Stylistically these eighteen operas vary greatly. The musical idiom is diverse, ranging from works in a modernist idiom such as The Ghost Wife, Whitsunday, Fly Away Peter, Black River and Bride of Fortune, to Voss, Batavia, Bliss, Lindy, Midnight Son, The Riders, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Children's Bach being works which straddle several musical styles. A number of operas draw strongly on musical theatre including The Eighth Wonder, Pecan Summer, The Rabbits and Cloudstreet, and Love in the Age of Therapy is couched in a predominantly jazz idiom. While some of them are overtly political, all, at least tangentially, deal with recent cultural politics in Australia and offer sharply differing perspectives.

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades. This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an often entertaining insight into Lully's once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new illustrations.

German music critic and opera producer Paul Bekker (1882-1937) is a rare example of a critic granted the opportunity to turn his ideas into practice. In this first full-length study of Bekker in English, Nanette Nielsen investigates Bekker's theory and practice in light of ethics and aesthetics, in order to uncover the ways in which these intersect in his work and contributed to the cultural and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. By linking Beethoven's music to issues of freedom and individuality, as he argues for its potential to unify the masses, Bekker had already in 1911 begun to construct the ethical framework for his musical sociology and opera aesthetics. Nielsen discusses some of the complex (and conflicting) layers of modernism and conservatism in Bekker that would have a continued presence in his work and its reception throughout his career. Bekker's demands for a 'practical ethics' led to his criticisms of metaphysically grounded approaches to aesthetics, and his ethical views are put into further relief in a sketch of the development of his music phenomenology in the 1920s. Nielsen unravels the complex intersections between Bekker's ethics and his opera aesthetics in connection with his practice as an Intendant at the Wiesbaden State Theatre (1927-1932), offering a critical reading of an opera staged during his tenure: Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930). Further works are considered in light of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, inspired by several intersections between ethics and aesthetics encountered in Bekker's work.

This volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner's Life, with his entry, as composer, of two successful operas, upon a so-called "practical" career at one of the principal German theatres.

The second volume of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.

Fourth volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.

Embodying Voice: Singing Verdi, Singing Wagner articulates the process of developing an operatic voice, explaining how and why the training of such a voice is as complex and sophisticated as it is mysterious. This book illustrates how putting together a voice, embodying a sound, and creating a character are vital to an audience's emotional involvement and enjoyment. Moreover, it addresses an imbalance of power between the opera director and the orchestra conductor - ultimately, it is the communicative power of the singer's voice that brings life to an opera, a fact well known by Verdi and Wagner. Embodying Voice highlights the singer's creative agency to be co-creator of the composer's music. It explores the ways in which vocal performance is constructed and controlled, connecting layers of mind and bodily engagement that allow operatic singers to achieve expression beyond the text itself. Further reading, listening, and performance lists are provided at the end of each chapter, complemented by musical examples throughout.

Embodying Voice: Singing Verdi, Singing Wagner articulates the process of developing an operatic voice, explaining how and why the training of such a voice is as complex and sophisticated as it is mysterious. This book illustrates how putting together a voice, embodying a sound, and creating a character are vital to an audience's emotional involvement and enjoyment. Moreover, it addresses an imbalance of power between the opera director and the orchestra conductor - ultimately, it is the communicative power of the singer's voice that brings life to an opera, a fact well known by Verdi and Wagner. Embodying Voice highlights the singer's creative agency to be co-creator of the composer's music. It explores the ways in which vocal performance is constructed and controlled, connecting layers of mind and bodily engagement that allow operatic singers to achieve expression beyond the text itself. Further reading, listening, and performance lists are provided at the end of each chapter, complemented by musical examples throughout.

The first biography of Richard D'Oyly Carte, this is a critical survey of the career of the impresario whose ambitions went beyond the famous partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan. Errors and misconceptions in current literature are challenged and corrected to give a truer portrayal of one of the most influential music theatre promoters in the nineteenth century.

First published in 1994. This study sets out to investigate English opera from 1834 to 1864. The author attempts to understand the circumstances influencing the development of English nineteenth-century opera, its characteristic features, and the reasons why these traits held sway. This title will be of great interest to students of art and cultural history.