The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism-the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages-powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries. Thirty-three chapters from an international group of scholars explore topics ranging from the representation of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century opera to medievalism in contemporary video game music, thereby connecting disparate musical forms across typical musicological boundaries of chronology and geography. While some chapters focus on key medievalist works such as Orff's Carmina Burana or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, others explore medievalism in the oeuvre of a single composer (e.g. Richard Wagner or Arvo Part) or musical group (e.g. Led Zeppelin). The topics of the individual chapters include both well-known works such as John Boorman's film Excalibur and also less familiar examples such as Eduard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The authors of the chapters approach their material from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historical musicology, popular music studies, music theory, and film studies, examining the intersections of medievalism with nationalism, romanticism, ideology, nature, feminism, or spiritualism. Taken together, the contents of the Handbook develop new critical insights that venture outside traditional methodological constraints and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism.

Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant et les sortileges (1919-25) are pivotal works in the composer's relatively small oeuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration, his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and the centrality of language and literature in his compositional practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of French music.

Known worldwide as a composer of symphonies and chamber music, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak declared toward the end of his life that his main love was writing operas. Written in 1900 at the height of Dvorak's creative powers, his fairy tale opera Rusalka is a masterpiece firmly established in the international repertory-from 2010 to 2012 alone, over 200 performances of 27 productions of the opera played in 21 European cities alone! Worldwide, music schools and summer programs have mounted the work, as well, reflecting not only the power of Dvorak's music but the lyricism and depth of Jaroslav Kvapil's Czech libretto, one of the greatest of all opera libretti, regardless of language. This book serves as an aid to anyone seeking to perform and gain a deeper understanding of this multi-layered opera, which so trenchantly asks what it means to be human, to love, and to be loved in return. In the first part, Czech music scholar Timothy Cheek offers a thorough review of Czech lyric diction and inflection, describes the characters and their vocal requirements, and supplies a synopsis of the plot, an elucidation of the layers of meaning in Kvapil's libretto, a section on musical style and dance elements, and a fascinating explanation of why such a remarkable work took so long to be embraced by Western audiences. In the second half, Cheek gives word-for-word and idiomatic English translations of the Czech libretto, including stage directions, along with the International Phonetic Alphabet for pronunciation. Rounding out the book are illustrations from the Prague National Theatre, New York Metropolitan Opera, and elsewhere, as well as an appendix listing recordings and videos. Rusalka: A Performance Guide with Translations and Pronunciation is written for singers, pianists, vocal coaches, conductors, stage directors, translators, and opera enthusiasts-anyone who wishes to perform the work, or who is simply moved and intrigued by this stunning opera.

In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'. The operas were translated into English, fitted with spoken dialogue, divested of much of their music, augmented with interpolations and frequently set to altered libretti. By the end of the period, the radical changes of earlier adaptations gave way to more faithful versions. In the first comprehensive study of these adaptations, Christina Fuhrmann shows how integral they are to our understanding of early nineteenth-century opera and the transformation of London's theatrical and musical life. This book reveals how these operas accelerated repertoire shifts in the London theatrical world, fostered significant changes in musical taste, revealed the ambiguities and inadequacies of copyright law and sparked intense debate about fidelity to the original work.

Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? In this book, author Alexandra Wilson traces La Boheme's rise to fame and demonstrates that its success grew steadily through stage performances, recordings, filmed versions and the endorsements of star singers. More recently, popular songs, film soundtracks and musicals that draw on the opera's music and themes added further to its immense cultural impact. This cultural history offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. Wilson argues that La Boheme's approach to realism and its flouting of conventions of the Italian operatic tradition made it strikingly modern for the 1890s. She explores how Puccini and his librettists engaged with gender, urban poverty and nostalgia-themes that grew out of the work's own time and continue to resonate with audiences more than 120 years later. Her analysis of the opera's depiction of Paris reveals that La Boheme was not only influenced by the romantic mythologies surrounding the city to this day but also helped shape them. Wilson's consideration of how directors have reinvented this opera for a new age completes this fascinating history of La Boheme, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this opera and the works it inspired.

Historians of French politics, art, philosophy and literature have long known the tensions and fascinations of Louis XV's reign, the 1750s in particular. David Charlton's study comprehensively re-examines this period, from Rameau to Gluck and elucidates the long-term issues surrounding opera. Taking Rousseau's Le Devin du Village as one narrative centrepiece, Charlton investigates this opera's origins and influences in the 1740s and goes on to use past and present research to create a new structural model that explains the elements of reform in Gluck's tragedies for Paris. Charlton's book opens many new perspectives on the musical practices and politics of the period, including the Querelle des Bouffons. It gives the first detailed account of intermezzi and opere buffe performed by Eustachio Bambini's troupe at the Paris Opera from August 1752 to February 1754 and discusses Rameau's comedies Platee and Les Paladins and their origins.

Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children's musicals tap into adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of musicals, including works inspired by the books of children's authors such as Roald Dahl, P.L. Travers, and Francis Hodgson Burnett; created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lionel Bart, and other leading lights of musical theater; or conceived for a cast made up entirely of children. The collection examines musicals that propagate or complicate normative attitudes regarding what childhood is or should be. It also considers the child performer in movie musicals as well as in professional and amateur stage musicals. This far-ranging collection highlights the special place that musical theater occupies in the imaginations and lives of children as well as adults. The collection comes at a time of increased importance of musical theater in the lives of children and young adults.

'Who can turn skies back and begin again?' -Peter This book contends that Peter Grimes, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential operas of the 20th century, is also one of the British theatre's finest 'lost' plays. Seeking to liberate Britten and Slater's work from the blinkered traditions of theatre and opera criticism, Sam Kinchin-Smith poses two questions: If an opera was created like a play, and can be staged as a play, is it a play? If a portion of its success and influence is the product of this newly identified theatrical engine, is it then a great play? The answers involve Wagner and W.G. Sebald, George Crabbe and Complicite, Akenfield and Twin Peaks. Challenging long-established narratives of post-war theatre history, this book makes a compelling case for why practitioners and scholars of performance ought to pay more attention to Britten and Slater's achievement - a milestone of unconventional English modernism - and perhaps to other operatic masterpieces too.

At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War.

Originally published in 1922, this book contains a history of English opera described through the lens of The Beggar's Opera, first performed in 1728. Kidson details the background to the opera's creation, its author, and its lasting impact on the English opera scene. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the English opera and English musical history.

Is this a hard-boiled detective tale disguised as a lounge act - or the other way around?

This book answers questions from real classical music lovers about things they have always wondered but didn't know whom to ask. The information in this book is not readily found in music history or appreciation books, nor can it be found on line. Questions explored are: Do string players in orchestras get paid more because they play more than other instruments? Why does an orchestra tune to an oboe when there are electronic tuners? How does a composer decide what key to compose in? Why is the 1812 Overture played on the 4th of July? And many, many more! The answers represent behind the scenes, real world, insights into how classical musicians view and discuss these questions. There is even some insight into the jokes classical musicians find funny. This book is intended for the person who loves listening to classical music, either live or recorded and will provide hours of enjoyment as the reader invariably shakes his or her head and asks in wonderment "Who knew!"

This seminal study of Giuseppe Verdi's German-language reception provides important new perspectives on German musical culture and nationalism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Kreuzer argues that the concept of Germany's musical supremacy, so dear to its nationalist cause, was continually challenged by the popularity of Italian opera, a genre increasingly epitomised by Verdi. The book traces the many facets of this Italian-German opposition in the context of intense historical developments from German unification in 1871 to the end of World War II and beyond. Drawing on an exceptionally broad range of sources, Kreuzer explores the construction of visual and biographical images of Verdi; the marketing, interpretation and adaptation of individual works; regional, social and religious undercurrents in German musical life; and overt political appropriations. Suppressed, manipulated and, not least, guiltily enjoyed, Verdi emerges as a powerful influence on German intellectuals' ideas about their collective identity and Germany's paradigmatic musical Other.

First published in 1931, this book presents the text of Thomas Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen, which was performed in this form as an acted adaptation at the New Theatre, Cambridge from 10-14 February 1931. Purcell based his opera on A Midsummer Night's Dream and this version was altered to incorporate more dialogue from Shakespeare's play in place of changes made by an anonymous librettist in 1692. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Purcell and Shakespeare.

Commissioned by the enterprising actor-manager John Rich, Covent Garden's Theatre Royal first opened its doors in December 1732. Principally a playhouse during its first century, the venue has had an eventful history involving two disastrous fires and riots over ticket prices. Most notably, it hosted Handel's incomparable operas and oratorios, and was where he presented regular seasons from 1735 until his death in 1759. Not until 1847, under Michael Costa, did the theatre dedicate itself to opera, and in 1892 it received the name by which it is known today: the Royal Opera House. Secretary of the Guildhall School of Music from 1901 to 1935, Henry Saxe Wyndham (1867 1940) published this richly illustrated two-volume account in 1906, celebrating the venue's legendary personalities and productions. Volume 1 covers the period 1732 to 1819 and includes discussion of John Rich, John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and Handel's operas."

Commissioned by the enterprising actor-manager John Rich, Covent Garden's Theatre Royal first opened its doors in December 1732. Principally a playhouse during its first century, the venue has had an eventful history involving two disastrous fires and riots over ticket prices. Most notably, it hosted Handel's incomparable operas and oratorios, and was where he presented regular seasons from 1735 until his death in 1759. Not until 1847, under Michael Costa, did the theatre dedicate itself to opera, and in 1892 it received the name by which it is known today: the Royal Opera House. Secretary of the Guildhall School of Music from 1901 to 1935, Henry Saxe Wyndham (1867 1940) published this richly illustrated two-volume account in 1906, celebrating the venue's legendary personalities and productions. Volume 2 covers the period 1819 to 1897 and includes appendices which list principal events and managers."

Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense today, a century ago opera was an integral part of American popular music culture, and familiarity with opera was still a part of American "cultural literacy." During the Ragtime era, hundreds of humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjects-either directly quoting operas or alluding to operatic characters and vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the moment when popular music in America transitioned away from its European operatic heritage, and when the distinction between low- and high-brow "popular" musical forms was free to develop, with all its attendant cultural snobbery and rebellion. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century.

While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European-Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

Verdi's operas - composed between 1839 and 1893 - portray a striking diversity of female protagonists: warrior women and peacemakers, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gypsies, mothers and daughters, erring and idealised wives, and, last of all, a feisty quartet of Tudor townswomen in Verdi's final opera, Falstaff. Yet what meanings did the impassioned crises and dilemmas of these characters hold for the nineteenth-century female spectator, especially during such a turbulent span in the history of the Italian peninsula? How was opera shaped by society - and was society similarly influenced by opera? Contextualising Verdi's female roles within aspects of women's social, cultural and political history, Susan Rutherford explores the interface between the reality of the spectators' lives and the imaginary of the fictional world before them on the operatic stage.

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.

Sentimental Opera is a study of the relationship between opera and two major phenomena of eighteenth-century European culture - the cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama. A thorough examination of social and cultural contexts helps to explain the success of operas such as Paisiello's Nina as well as the extreme emotional reactions of their audiences. Like their counterparts in drama, literature and painting, these works brought to the fore serious contemporary problems including the widespread execution of deserters, the treatment of the insane, and anxieties relative to social and familial roles. They also developed a specifically operatic version of the dominant language of sensibility. This wide-ranging study involves such major cultural figures as Goldoni, Diderot and Mozart, while refining our understanding of the theatrical genre system of their time.

Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, is remembered today for such novels as Le Rouge et le Noir. Over the course of his life, he wrote in a variety of literary genres and under a multitude of names, or anonymously. Reissued here is the 1824 English translation of his Vie de Rossini of the same year, which was accused of being partly plagiarised from Giuseppe Carpani's Le Rossiniane, following similar claims regarding his biographies of Haydn and Mozart (which are also reissued together in translation in this series). Best known for William Tell and The Barber of Seville, Gioachino Rossini (1792 1868) was by far the most popular opera composer of his day, adored by his public. Colourful, vigorous and forthright, Stendhal's brilliant though somewhat unreliable biography offers an opinionated contemporary critique of 'Signor Crescendo'.

In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his political ideas, his intellectual vision, and his powerful means of communicating them through his music. In his survey of the music itself, Budden emphasizes the unique character of each work as well as the developing sophistication of Verdi's style. He covers all of the operas, the late religious works, the songs, and the string quartet. A glossary explains even the most obscure operatic terms current in Verdi's time.

Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas,including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Salle" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.

Originally published in 1925, the text for this edition of Semele was compiled from the 1710 edition of Congreve's works and the altered version adopted by Handel and published in 1762. The work was performed in this form at the New Theatre, Cambridge in February 1925. Lines omitted by the composer are printed in smaller type, and his interpolations are set within square brackets. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Congreve and Handel.