The earlier edition of this book, published in 1979, surveyed 75 years of opera, offering synopses of 78 major works, noting trends and accomplishments and speculating upon what was likely in the next 25 years. Now, from the threshold of the millennium, George Martin reports on the entire twentieth century, replacing speculation with operas composed and trends established. To that end some parts of the last edition (but none of the synopses) have been replaced with new material.

After exhaustive research into the D'Oyly Carte collection of documents, Ainger offers the most detailed account to date of Gilbert and Sullivan's starkly different backgrounds and long working partnership. "A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan," W.S. Gilbert once summed his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. Indeed, Michael Ainger suggests, it is the clash between these two strong personalities that accounts for the success of their work together, as each partner challenged the other to produce his best work.

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourie explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourie. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourie was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourie left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourie serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourie himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourie attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourie's own. Yet even if Lourie seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourie's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourie, and the world, saw disappear.

The Bible and Western culture is a burgeoning area of interest in recent scholarship, but comparatively little has been written on the Bible and music. Leneman's is a groundbreaking work, making some pioneering forays across an important interdisciplinary divide. The Performed Bible is an in-depth study of the librettos and music of 12 operas and oratorios on the story of Ruth from the last two centuries, establishing the potential of music, as a kind of midrash, for transforming a Bible text, its narrative and its characterization. The book includes detailed analyses of musical segments, the author being a cantor and professional musician in whose Jewish tradition biblical texts are chanted, not read. This fresh and insightful work will no doubt prove attractive to biblical scholars, to musicians and to music lovers generally.

Opera has often used classical literature as a means of expressing the most vital concerns of the period in which the operas were written. "Sing SorroW" explores the classical roots of many noted operas, illustrating the ways in which the operas reflected the political concerns of their time through these ancient narratives. In particular, though female opera characters are often regarded as victims, they are actually quite heroic, frequently shaping their own destinies.

Each chapter provides background and historical context, examines the relationship between the opera and the original work of literature, and suggests what the music contributes to the interpretation. Through the lens of the classics, "Sing SorroW" approaches opera from a unique aesthetic and cultural standpoint, giving a new perspective to both opera and its literary and dramatic ancestors.

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.

From the very beginning of the nineteenth century, many elements of Spanish culture carried an air of 'exoticism' for the French-and nothing played more important of a role in shaping the French idea of Spain than the country's musical tradition. However, as Samuel Llano argues in Whose Spain?, perceptions and representations of Spanish musical identities changed in the early twentieth century, due to the emergence of the hispanistes. These specialists on Spanish music and culture, who wrote encyclopedic and 'scientific' articles on 'Spanish music,' strived to endow the world of Spanish music with a sense of authority and knowledge. Yet, the writings of those hispanistes and other music critics showed a highly sensationalist attitude, aimed at describing 'Spanish music' in a way that was instrumental to the interests of French musicians. At the same time, the Spanish fought to articulate their own identities through the creation and performance of new musical works. In this book, Llano analyzes the socio-political discourses underpinning critical and musicological descriptions of 'Spanish music' and the discourse's connection with French politics and culture. He also studies operas and other musical works for the stage as privileged sites for the production of Spanish musical identities, given the enhanced possibilities of performance for cultural and critical engagement. The study covers the period 1908 to 1929, when representations of 'Spanish music' in the writings of the hispaniste Henri Collet and other French musicians underwent several transformations, mostly sparked by the need to reformulate French identity during and after the First World War. Ultimately, Llano demonstrates that definitions of 'French' and 'Spanish' music were to some extent interdependent, and that the public performances of these pieces even helped the musical community in France to begein to reformulate their notions of 'Spanish music' and identity.

Designed to aid the student, librarian, teacher, or professional singer, this annotated bibliography provides access to more than 500 books, journals, and electronic resources. Included as well are chapters listing dictionaries and encyclopedias for opera and musical theater, biographical sources, guides to vocal literature and repertoire, and resources for vocal pedagogy and for the stage. Equally helpful are sources that list plots and synopses, translations, diction, travel and education.

Providing ready access to a variety of topics and resources necessary for vocal study, this important reference will introduce music students to reliable, essential sources for their study, assist teachers and coaches in finding reference tools, and assist reference librarians in locating sources for patrons. The alphabetical organization within subject makes this reference easy to understand and easy to access. Three indexes allow for convenient cross-referencing.

This study looks at nineteenth - and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary high form of art altogether. Jeremy Tambling highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a general overview of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others, drawing on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author draws on the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics. Resisting the cliches about Wagner or Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich, Tambling takes the opera out the hermetically sealed-off state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it as both complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the `culture of fascism', and those that tried to make opera part of the `fascism of culture'.

Whether you are ""in the business,"" or a music theorist, musicologist, or simply an opera fan - read on! This is an analytical monograph by a Schenkerian theorist, but it is also written by one performer and enthusiast for another. ""Tonality as Drama"" draws on the fields of dramaturgy, music theory, and historical musicology to answer a fundamental question about twentieth-century music: Why does tonality persist in opera, even after it has been abandoned in other genres?Combining the analytical approaches of the leading music and dramatic theorists of the twentieth century - Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) and Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) - Edward D. Latham reveals insights into works by Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Aaron Copland that are relevant to analysts, opera directors, and performers alike. ""Tonality as Drama"" is not a textbook - rather, it is an innovative study meant to inspire changes in the analysis and performance of tonal opera.

In 1759 the court of the Italian Duchy of Parma adopted the inspiration of cultural creators who recommended a reform of Italian opera along French lines. These writers favored combining Italian-style music with the wider range of musical genres and scenic variety of French opera. As the prize-winning music critic and commentator George W. Loomis shows in this groundbreaking volume, the young composer Tommaso Traetta was engaged to create new operas responding to these demands. As Loomis deftly demonstrates, Traetta's operas were largely oriented toward the formal aria, a byproduct of making Italian music an essential component of this cross-cultural fusion. Nevertheless, they were strikingly innovative in their use of chorus, integrated dance, and accompanied recitative. Structurally, the operas reflect the French distinction between scenes of action and divertissements. After a brief flowering in the 1760s, the project was abandoned, primarily for lack of interest, but Traetta's Parma operas deserve a previously unrecognized place in the history of Western music for their stimulation of opera seria in Italy and beyond. This included the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose genre-defining Idomeneo (1781) proved a turning point in the development of opera.

This generously illustrated selection of fifty reviews and essays, written between 1914 and 1962 by thirty American critics, draws together some of the best, most influential, and most interesting writing on Montemezzi, revealing for the first time the full depth of his impact in the United States, the country to which he moved in 1939.

Dramma per musica-the most usual term for Italian serious opera from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century-was a modern, enlightened form of theater that presented a unified, artistically designed, dramatic enactment of human stories, expressed by the voice and underscored by the orchestra. This book by one of the world's most eminent musicologists illustrates the diversity of this baroque art form and explains how it has given us opera as we know it. Reinhard Strohm introduces the concept and history of dramma per musica and then examines the contemporary reception and environment of this operatic tradition, analyzing its social and repertorial patterns and comparing it to theories on the roles of French spoken drama and Italian libretto reform. In describing the principles observed by poets, composers, and performers, Strohm discusses such central concepts of theory and practice as verisimilitude, decorum, gesture, and rhetoric. He also decodes various works, including Handel's Ariodante, operas by Hasse, and stage works featuring the Earl of Essex. Throughout the book, Strohm surveys the traditions of the spoken theater and pays special attention to the subject matter of the librettos, as well as to drama theory, stage action, patronage, political history, and ideology. His account covers opera houses in Rome, Naples, Venice, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Madrid, London, and Warsaw, as he follows one character of the dramatic tradition across the European stages for more than two centuries. Authoritative and enlightening, this book reveals how dramma per musica forms a vital part of our theatrical and musical heritage.

The past decade has overflowed in a raging stream of contradictions. Old certainties have yielded to relentless insecurity over a time when much of the human experience got immeasurably better even as many things only ever seemed to get worse. As Paul du Quenoy's globetrotting criticism reveals, the arts were in a ferment that matched profound and yet totally unpredicted social and political transformations. Balanced, sometimes precariously, against the demands of an absurd and increasingly superfluous academic career, du Quenoy spent the 2010s seeking enlightenment, inspiration, and, above all, diversion, in total works of art all over the world, ranging from the traditional cultural capitals to humbler and more remote surroundings. Peering through the prism of performance, Through the Years With Prince Charming offers a unique bird's eye view of art and life in a changing world.

Film technology developments in the early 20th century opened up a new world of possibilities for the motion picture industry, and opera, relying as it did on the melodramatic storyline and grand pantomime acting, was an ideal subject for early silent film. Even deprived of their principal glory-their voices-opera singers were among the first prominent screen stars. This book examines the relationship between the established operatic stars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the newly developing motion picture industry. It concentrates primarily on developments between 1895 and 1926, from the invention of the commercially exploitable motion picture to the coming of viable sound on film. Early chapters discuss the changing role of the opera star prior to and during the development of film as a popular commercial medium, and explore the technological innovations that eventually enabled opera to move out of the strict confines of the opera house and to be viewed by a global audience. Later chapters expose the fragile relationship between art and the entertainment industry in the early decades of the motion picture, and show how the opera helped establish a balance between film as a new art form and its commercial exploitation. Also discussed is the extent to which the inclusion of opera in early motion pictures contributed to the broader democratization of art. The book concludes with four detailed case studies that examine the experiences of operatic performers who made the transition to the silent screen and who made a notable impact on the early movie industry. An extensive filmography is included to provide the reader with full details of films cited and archival locations of surviving materials.

It has been said that zarzuela means to Spain what operetta means to Vienna, Offenbach to Paris, Gilbert and Sullivan to London, and the musical to Broadway. Zarzuela is Spain's unique contribution to lyric theatre, a mixture of spoken and sung drama with a complex history extending over four centuries. The Zarzuela Companion is a comprehensive guide to zarzuela's most popular and romantic works written after 1850, with chapters devoted to the major Spanish zarzuela composers, writers and singers. Complete synopses of all sixty works selected are delivered at the level of detail necessary for non-Spanish speakers to follow along with ease. The book also features special sections on the history of the genre, and on the parallel Catalan and Cuban zarzuela traditions. A foreword by Placido Domingo, a selected discography with current catalog reference numbers, a brief bilingual bibliography and glossary of Spanish terms make this book indispensable for the newcomer and aficionado alike.

The opera-goer's indispensable guide.

About to see Rossini's William Tell, Menotti's The Consul, Gluck's Alceste, John Adams's Nixon in China? The stories of these operas and 121 others are told, clearly and concisely, in this companion volume to the highly successful Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas. John Freeman untangles and summarizes the often complicated plots and, in addition, provides an informative biographical sketch of each composer, premiere dates for the works, lists of characters, and other useful information.

• Published jointly by the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Norton.

Dame Schwarzkopf (1915-2006) was a Flower Maiden in Wagner's "Parsifal" in her opera debut. As Marchallin in Strauss' "Rosenkavalier" she made history. This book is a homage to one of the greatest singers of the last century. Honored by Queen Elisabeth II, she not only posessed an unmistakable timbre, but also a bewitching beauty.This pictorial volume, on which the soprano collaborated right up until the time of her sudden death, contains hundreds of costume and portrait photographs from her private estate that together provide a lasting reflection of her personality and elegance. The core pictures were taken by the Viennese photographer to the stars, Lillian Fayer, who for many years was the trusted companion of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

(Amadeus). This autobiography is the first full-length book in English on Nicolai Gedda, born in Sweden in 1925 but deeply influenced by his Russian-born stepfather, himself a singer with a renowned Russian emigre choir. A leading tenor throughout the latter half of the 20th century, Gedda is acclaimed both for the beauty of his voice and the rare intelligence with which he uses it; he is perhaps the most versatile of tenors, equally at home in opera and song, and the master of nine languages and a wide range of musical styles. These memoirs, written in collaboration with his wife, comment frankly on the events of his life and on the international music scene, revealing both his serious devotion to his art and his indifference to fame and celebrity. HARDCOVER.

"Bringing the study of Chinese theatre into the 21st-century, Lei discusses ways in which traditional art can survive and thrive in the age of modernization and globalization. Building on her previous work, this new book focuses on various forms of Chinese "opera" in locations around the Pacific Rim, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and California"--

This study sets Mozart, especially his four most celebrated operas - "Il Seraglio", "Cosi Fan Tutte", "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute", in the context of Enlightenment literature and thought. For this new edition, the author has revised a number of passages and has focused on "Idomeneo" and "La Clemenza di Tito".