First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The beautifully illustrated volume is an editorial tribute to the history of the Comunale Theatre in Bologna, a city institution of international fame. With previously unpublished and richly detailed images and complementary texts by Professor Piero Mioli, this publication celebrates the theatre's great and unique story. Also included is a rich photographic array from the theatre's historical archives featuring posters, stage photos, sketches, drawings and figurine plates, which have been hidden from public view, until now. Text in English and Italian.

Responding to the ever-increasing popularity and international performances of operas by the Czech composer Leo? Janacek, this volume is the second in a series to meet the needs of English-speaking singers, conductors, coaches, and stage directors. Every word of Kat'a Kabanova is translated into English, and idiomatic translations are provided, including translations of stage and musical directions. In addition, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used to indicate pronunciation, following the clearly-presented method given in the author's book Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire (Scarecrow Press, 2001). Included are practical notes about Janacek's style, both in general terms and specific issues relating to this opera. A plot summary is provided along with translations of characters, ranges, and the pronunciation of their names. The entire volume is organized in a clear, readable format, resulting in a book that will help to make productions of Kat'a Kabanova in the original Czech much easier a task than ever before.

Performance is a forum for social action, embodied interaction and shared authority. Recently, as the various acts and agencies surrounding a performance have become the target of scholarly interest, the complex split between theory and practice has been challenged, as has the idea of a singular, disembodied authorial ownership of the socio-material meanings surrounding performance. The Embodiment of Authority approaches performance, issues of authority and negotiated knowledge production through multi-material research data and interdisciplinary methods. The book discusses the relationship between authorial questions and performances via the following topics: shared authorities, ontologies of art work, diverse roles of rehearsals in the performance process, and embodied knowledge.

The conversations the 63-year-old Rossini had with Ferdinand Hiller in Trouville in Normandy in September 1855, and the finely drafted impression of Rossini himself with which Hiller prefaces the conversations, will be of exceptional interest to all music lovers. No other single source offers so vivid a sense of Rossini the man and the musician, not to mention the many composers, performers, and people of influence he knew and met. This is the first complete publication of the conversations in English.

Medievalism, or the reception or interpretation of the Middle Ages, was a prominent aesthetic for German opera composers in the first half of the nineteenth century. A healthy competition to establish a Germanic operatic repertory arose at this time, and fascination with medieval times served a critical role in shaping the desire for a unified national and cultural identity. Using operas by Weber, Schubert, Marshner, Wagner, and Schumann as case studies, Richardson investigates what historical information was available to German composers in their recreations of medieval music, and whether or not such information had any demonstrable effect on their compositions. The significant role that nationalism played in the choice of medieval subject matter for opera is also examined, along with how audiences and critics responded to the medieval milieu of these works. In this book, readers will gain a clear understanding of the rise of German opera in the early nineteenth century and the cultural and historical context in which this occurred. This book will also provide insight on the reception of medieval history and medieval music in nineteenth-century Germany, and will demonstrate how medievalism and nationalism were mutually reinforcing phenomena at this time and place in history.

In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values.
It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.

New essays demonstrating and exploring the abiding fascination of Wagner's controversial work. Richard Wagner's Parsifal remains an inexhaustible yet highly controversial work. This "stage consecration festival play," as the composer described it, represents the culmination of his efforts to bring medieval myth and modern music together in a dynamic relationship. Wagner's engagement with religion--Buddhist as well as Christian--reaches a climax here, as he seeks through artistic means "to rescue the essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols . . . according to their figurative value, enabling us to see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation." The contributors to this collection break fresh ground in exploring the text, the music, andthe reception history of Parsifal. Wagner's borrowings-and departures-from the medieval sources of the Grail legend, Wolfram's Parzival and Chretien's Perceval, are considered in detail, and the tensional relation of the work to Christianity is probed. New perspectives emerge that bear on the long genesis of the text and music, its affinities to Wagner's earlier works, particularly Tristan und Isolde, and the precise way in which the music was composed. Essays address the work's bold, modernistic musical language and its unprecedented soundscape involving hidden choruses and other unseen sources of sound. The turbulent, astonishing, and sometimes disturbing history of Parsifal performances from 1882 until 2004 is traced in vivid detail for the first time, demonstrating the abiding fascination exerted by this uniquely challenging work of art. Contributors: MaryA. Cicora, James M. McGlathery, Ulrike Kienzle, Warren Darcy, Roger Allen. William Kinderman and Katherine Syer teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and often lead study seminars during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.

Amanda Glauert revisits Beethoven's songs and studies his profound engagement with the aesthetics of the poets he was setting, particularly those of Herder and Goethe. The book offers readers a rich exploration of the poetical and philosophical context in which Beethoven found himself when composing songs. It also offers detailed commentaries on possible responses to specific songs, responses designed to open up new ways for performing, hearing and appreciating this provocative song repertoire. This study will be of great interest to researchers of Beethoven; German song; aesthetics of words and music.

The death of Spain's Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, on July 24, 1568, remains an enigma. Several accounts insinuated that the Spanish Crown Prince was murdered while incarcerated by order of his father, King Philip II. The mystery of Don Carlos's death, supported by ambassadorial accounts that implied foul play, became a fertile subject for defamation campaigns against Philip, fostering an extraordinary fluidity between history and fiction. This book investigates three treatments of the Don Carlos legend on which this fluidity had a potent, transformational impact: Cesar Vichard de Saint-Real's novel, Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672), Friedrich Schiller's play, Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (1787), and Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Don Carlos (1867). Through these cultural variations on a historical theme, the authors and composer contributed innovative elements to their genres. In The Don Carlos Enigma, the exciting young scholar Maria-Cristina Necula explores how the particular blend of history and fiction around the personage of Don Carlos inspired such artistic liberties with evolutionary outcomes. Saint-Real advanced the nouvelle historique genre by developing the element of conspiracy. Schiller's play began the transition from the Sturm und Drang literary movement towards Weimar Classicism. Verdi introduced new dramatic and musical elements to bring opera closer to the realism of dramatic theatre. Within each of these treatments, pivotal points of narrative, semantic, dramatic, and musical transformation shaped not only the story of Don Carlos, but the expressive forms themselves. In support of the investigation, selected scenes from the three works are explored and framed by an engagement with studies in the fields of French literature, German theatre, French and Italian opera, and Spanish history. The enigma of the Spanish prince may never be solved, but Saint-Real, Schiller, and Verdi have offered alternatives that, in a sense, unburden history of truth that it could never bear alone. In the case of Don Carlos, history is in itself an encyclopedia of variations.

This study offers a reassessment of the librettist, parodist and critic Nicolas-Etienne Framery (1745-1810) whom scholars have frequently mentioned in passing, but whose career remains little known and poorly understood today. Though Framery was also active as a translator of Italian epic works and an occasional author of narrative, this study considers his work as a dramatist and theatrical critic, and demonstrates his constant concern for progress in French lyric theatre. Framery was one of the generation of librettists to write for the new Comedie-Italienne after 1762, and his enthusiasm for the innovative opera-comique was unfailing. His attention to musical terminology made him one of the major contributors, alongside Momigny and Ginguene, to the Encyclopedie methodique: musique. Unlike better-known theorists of music such as Rousseau, Framery adopted a progressive stance towards musical theatre and took an active part, in the 1770s, in the introduction of Italian lyric forms into the French theatre world. Parodies of Sacchini and Paisiello are considered here, as are Framery's theoretical views on composition, on the relationship between music and language, and on operatic word setting. His progressivism extended to journalism (he was the editor of the first periodical on music in France, the Journal de musique, and a columnist for the Mercure de France) and to administrative issues (he acted as agent for the Bureau established to protect authors' rights during the Revolution). Framery's writings for the Journal, for the Encyclopedie methodique, and for the Institut de France show him to be a pioneering thinker on music who preferred the concept of expression to classical theories of music as imitation. Framery's approach led him to adopt a career at variance with tradition and it is only now, in the light of recent research on the opera-comique, that his innovations in the lyric theatre can be properly appreciated.

Performing Arts in Changing Societies is a detailed exploration of genre development within the fields of dance, theatre, and opera in selected European countries during the decades before and after 1800. An introductory chapter outlines the theoretical and ideological background of genre thinking in Europe, starting from antiquity. A further fourteen chapters cover the performing genres as they developed in England, France, Germany, and Austria, and follow the dissemination and adaptation of the corresponding genres in minor and major cities in the Nordic countries. With a strong emphasis on the role that pragmatic and contextual factors had in defining genres, the book examines such subjects as the dancing masters in Christiania (Oslo), circa 1800, the repertory and travels of an itinerant acrobat and his wife in Norway in the 1760s, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas on bourgeois drama in Denmark. Including detailed analyses in the light of material, political, and social factors, this is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of musicology, opera studies, and theatre and performance studies.

Opera Coaching: Professional Techniques for the Repetiteur, Second Edition, is an update to the first practical guide for opera coaches when working with opera singers to help them meet the physical and vocal demands of a score in order to shape a performance. Opera coaching remains a mystery to many musicians. While an opera coach (or repetiteur) is principally tasked with ensuring singers sing the right notes and words, the coach's purview extends well beyond pitches and pronunciation. The opera coach must have a full understanding of human physiognomy and the human voice, as well as a knowledge of the many languages used in Western vocal music and over four centuries of opera repertoire - all to recognize what must happen for success when a singer steps on stage. NEW to this second edition: New and updated chapters throughout, featuring new discussions on large ensembles, twenty-first-century demands, and more. Deeper investigation of the styles of and problems posed by particular operas. Revised chapter structure that allows for an expanded and progressive emphasis on technical work. Modern singers have bemoaned the scarcity of good vocal coaches and conductors - those who understand voices and repertoire alike. Opera Coaching: Professional Techniques for the Repetiteur, Second Edition, demystifies the role of the opera coach, outlining the obstacles facing both the opera singer and the coach who seeks to realize the performer's full potential.

This is the first literal, word-for-word translation of Wagner's epic masterwork with the full German text. Stewart Spencer's version is at once reliable and readable, adhering closely to the original verse form and to Wagner's poetic intentions. The German text is given in parallel, and Spencer also contributes illuminating footnote and an introductory essay. Other specially commissioned essays discuss the Cycle's musical structure, its philosophical implications, its medieval sources and Wagner's own changing attitude to its meaning. An appendix of Wagner's rejected versions, copious notes on the translation, a glossary of the names of characters in the Ring, an extensive bibliography and reviews of CD- and video-recordings conclude the volume.

Venetian playwright and pioneer of modern theatre Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) led a 'double life' as a librettist, authoring nearly as many libretti as comedies- libretti which, born from the same mind and the same hand that brought forth his famous, and famously controversial, overhaul of the practices of comic theatre, could not but push the limits of the standing tradition to open a new chapter in opera history. Goldoni became one of the first to give shape to the dramma giocoso per musica, an innovative, realistic, and enduring new genre with intimate connections to prose comedy that met with overwhelming international success, becoming the foundation for the works of future generations, including W. A. Mozart and his Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Perhaps because of his stature and influence as a comic playwright, Goldoni has rarely been considered as an innovator in the musical sphere. This study aims to shed new light on his primary role in the evolution of Classical opera, and on the legacy of his innovations in the European musical tradition.

More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta," remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent - genius in the ring with catastrophe. Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability - the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification. Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.

Original Italian texts with English translations of 145 arias from Rigoletto, The Marriage of Figaro, Lucia di Lammermoor, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, 45 more.

It wasn't enough for Melba to become one of the greats of the Golden Age of Grand Opera. She wanted to be the greatest. her glorious voice took her to the top; her ruthless determination to overthrow any rival kept her there long after the voice had begun to decline. Revealed in this relentlessly candid yet sympathetic study is Melba the drama queen, the monstrous prima donna, the canny businesswoman, the generous and kindly friend, the unique star who refused to fade. 'There are lots of duchesses but only one Melba' - Nellie Melba

Building on the long-established success of Ethan Mordden's Opera Anecdotes, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes continues where the original left off, bringing into view the new corps of major singers that arose after the first book's publication in 1985 - artists such as Renee Fleming, Roberto Alagna, Deborah Voigt, Jonas Kaufmann, Kathleen Battle, and Jane Eaglen (who tested her family with Turandot's three riddles and got a very original answer). There are also fresh adventures with opera's fabled great - Rossini, Wagner, Toscanini (whose temper tantrums are always good for a story), Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price (who, when the Met's Rudolf Bing offered her the voice-killing role of Abigaille in Verdi's Nabucco, said, "Man, are you crazy?"). Almost all the stories in The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes are completely new, whether from the present or the past, taking in many historical developments, from the rise of the conductor to the appearance of the gymmed-up "bari-hunk" who refuses to play any role in which he can't appear shirtless. While most of Mordden's anecdotes are humorous, some are emotionally touching, such as one recounting a Met production of Mozart's The Marriage Of Figaro in which Renee Fleming sang alongside her own six-year-old daughter. Other tales are suspenseful, as when Tito Gobbi shows off his ability to make anyone turn around simply by staring at his or her back. He tries it on Nazi monster Joseph Goebbels, who does turn around, and then starts to move toward Gobbi, seething with rage, step by step... Mordden recounts these stories in his own unique voice, amplifying events for reading pleasure and adding in background material so the opera newcomer can play on the same field as the aficionado. Witty, dramatoic, and at times a little shocking, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes will be a welcome addition to any opera fan's library.

"Alzira" is the seventh work and the sixth opera to be published in the critical edition of "The Works of Giuseppe Verdi," Composed during the middle of the very productive period of Verdi's first large-scale successes, "Alzira" premiered at Naples on August 12, 1845. Cammarano's libretto is based on a play of Voltaire, who used a real incident in sixteenth-century Peru during the Spanish conquest to shape a critique of the morality of the noble savage as against Christian values. The inherent conflicts and exotic setting appealed to Verdi's dramatic sense, and in its best moments the music of "Alzira" fully realizes his potential as a masterful composer for the theater.
Because the success of the premiere was not repeated, "Alzira" fell out of the repertory and no orchestral score was ever published. The critical edition, based on Verdi's autograph score and important secondary sources, provides the first reliable full score of the work. It is complemented by an introduction tracing the opera's genesis, sources and performance history and practices. Together with the detailed critical commentary, discussing problems and ambiguities in the sources, the edition provides scholars and performers alike with unequalled means for interpretation and study of this poorly known work.

La musica napoletana conosce uno straordinario successo europeo fin dai primi decenni del Settecento. I contributi raccolti in questo volume presentano le fonti e la fortuna dei Napoletani, e di Pergolesi in particolare, a Dresda, in Boemia e in Slesia. Le fonti pergolesiane vengono esaminate fin nei dettagli di scrittura, tanto in vista della nuova edizione critica quanto nella prospettiva della prassi esecutiva storicamente informata. La corrispondenza diplomatica tra Dresda e Napoli si rivela un canale ricchissimo di scambi di informazioni e di partiture. Lontano dalla corte sassone, per la diffusione della musica napoletana giocano un ruolo essenziale alcune famiglie nobiliari boeme. Le case di ordini religiosi (cistercensi, gesuiti) si scambiano tra Boemia e Slesia moltissime composizioni sacre, variamente adattate secondo i bisogni locali. Le opere napoletane sono popolarizzate dalle compagnie girovaghe di cantanti, che solitamente provengono dall'Italia settentrionale. Nuovi elementi biografici e analisi di opere arricchiscono la nostra conoscenza di conterranei o contemporanei di Pergolesi come Giovanni Alberto Ristori, Nicola Porpora, Domenico de Micco e Leonardo Leo. Neapolitan music enjoyed an extraordinary European success starting with the first decades of the 18th century. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the sources and the reception of the Neapolitans, and foremost of Pergolesi, in Dresden, in Bohemia and in Silesia. Pergolesi sources are described down to details of writing, with an eye both to the new critical edition and to historically informed performing practice. Diplomatical correspondence between Dresden and Naples was widely used as a source of musical information and a means of exchanging scores. Far from the Saxon court, the Neapolitan music is encouraged by some prominent Bohemian aristocrats. Different religious houses (cistercians, jesuits) exchange sacred music, variously adapted to local needs. Neapolitan opera is popularised through wandering troupes, coming mostly from Northern Italy. New biographical data and work analyses enrich our knowledge of contemporaries or fellow countrymen of Pergolesi's such as Giovanni Alberto Ristori, Nicola Porpora, Domenico de Micco and Leonardo Leo.

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.

For millions of people, the great soprano Maria Callas (1923-1977) remains the focus of such unparalleled fascination that there is still no higher praise for singers than "...the best since Callas." In this biography, Callas' career is brought brilliantly to life, from her transformation from a chubby, painfully shy girl into a magnificent, celebrated soprano, to her conflict with her larger-than-life image. Huffington makes this struggle, which was at the center of her life, also the center of the biography. Using a wealth of previously unpublished material and numerous first-hand interviews, Huffington documents Callas' interminable conflict with her mother, her deeply emotional relationship with her voice, the gradual unraveling of her first marriage, her passionate love affair with of Aristotle Onassis, her agony and humiliation at his leaving her, and her secret abortion.

Opera houses were everywhere. Many towns had at least one opera house on Main Street by 1900. Hundreds of theater troupes, opera companies, individual performers, and many sundry entertainers then tred the boards of these halls as new rail lines could bring these troupers to previously isolated hamlets in new and old sections of the country. Five hundred troupes called "Tommers " performed only Uncle Tom's Cabin. Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, and John Philip Sousa entertained thousands of townspeople as did innumerable minor league magicians, circuses, lecturers, and theater companies. At that time, more people saw live entertainment than at any other period making this the Golden Age for this distinctly American rural institution and the beginning of an era of mass entertainment These halls, called "opera houses " to lend a touch of urban sophistication, were often the only large place for public assembly in a town. Aside from cultural events, they served as a public hall for local activities like school graduations, recitations, sports and town meetings, elections, and political rallies and even social dances and roller skating parties. Some were housed in town or city halls, but most were built by local entrepreneurs or committees interested in promoting the town as well as attracting performers. Considered local landmarks, often in distinctive architect-designed buildings, they aroused considerable pride and reinforced town identity. These once-proud halls, however, succumbed in the early twentieth century as radio, movies, and later television and changing tastes made them seem obsolete. Some were demolished, but those that were abandoned to pigeons languished for decades until discovered in the last three decades by stalwart revivers in small towns across the county. The phoenix has indeed arisen. The resuscitation of these opera houses today reflects the timeless quest for cultural inspiration and for communal engagement to counter the anonymity of the virtual world. These revived halls are where "art and community " meet.