Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz tells the story of the interaction between musical form, film technology, and ideas about race, ethnicity, and the nation during the American cinema's conversion to sound. Contrary to most accepted narratives about the conversion, which tend to explain the competition between the Hollywood studios' film sound technologies in qualitative and economic terms, this book argues that the battle between disc and film sound was waged primarily in an aesthetic realm. Opera and jazz in particular, though long neglected in studies of the film score, were extremely important in defining the scope of the American soundtrack, not only during the conversion, but also once sound had been standardized. Examining studio advertisements, screenplays, scores, and the films themselves, the book concentrates on the interactions between musical form and film technology, arguing that each of the major studios appropriated opera and jazz in a unique way in order to construct its own version of an ideal American voice. The book's central question asks what the synthesis of opera and jazz during the conversion reveals about the stylistic and ideological norms of classical Hollywood cinema and the racial, ethnic, gendered, and socially stratified spaces of American musical production. Unlike much of the scholarship on film music, which gravitates toward feature film scores, Sounding American concentrates on the musical shorts of the late 1920s, showing how their representations of the stage, conservatory, ballroom, and nightclub reflected what opera and jazz meant for particular groups of Americans and demonstrating how the cinema helped to shape the racial, ethnic, and national identities attached to this music. Traditional histories of Hollywood film music have tended to concentrate on the unity of the score, a model that assumes a passive spectator. Sounding American claims that the classical Hollywood film is essentially an illustrated jazz-opera with a musical structure that encourages an active form of listening and viewing in order to make sense of what is ultimately a fragmentary text.

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde occupies a singular position in the history of Western culture. What Nietzsche called the 'sweet and terrible infinity' of its basic nexus of longing and death has fascinated audiences since its first performance in 1865. At the same time, its advanced harmonic language, immediately announced by the opening 'Tristan chord', marks a defining moment in the evolution of modern music. This accessible handbook brings together seven leading international writers to discuss the opera's genesis and the libretto's relationship to late Romantic literary concerns, present an analysis of the Prelude, the music of the drama itself, and Wagner's innovative use of instrumental timbre, and illustrate the production history and reception of the music-drama into the twenty-first century. The book includes the first English translation of Wagner's draft prose of the libretto, a detailed discussion of Wagner's orchestration, and rare pictures from important and influential productions.

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde occupies a singular position in the history of Western culture. What Nietzsche called the 'sweet and terrible infinity' of its basic nexus of longing and death has fascinated audiences since its first performance in 1865. At the same time, its advanced harmonic language, immediately announced by the opening 'Tristan chord', marks a defining moment in the evolution of modern music. This accessible handbook brings together seven leading international writers to discuss the opera's genesis and the libretto's relationship to late Romantic literary concerns, present an analysis of the Prelude, the music of the drama itself, and Wagner's innovative use of instrumental timbre, and illustrate the production history and reception of the music-drama into the twenty-first century. The book includes the first English translation of Wagner's draft prose of the libretto, a detailed discussion of Wagner's orchestration, and rare pictures from important and influential productions.

The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comedie humaine to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas pere's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantome de l'Opera. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.

How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Mozart, Haydn, Anfossi, Piccinni and Paisiello, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera. Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on the European cultural reception of American social and political identity. Through detailed but accessible analysis of music examples, including previously unpublished musical sources, the book documents and explains important transformations of opera at the time of Mozart's masterpieces, and its long-term consequences up to Puccini. Shedding new light on familiar and less-familiar operatic works, the study represents groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.

'Idiosyncratic, humorous, enlightening and written by one of the finest conductors alive ... This is the book to buy if you are going to see Wagner or listen to him at home' LITERARY REVIEW Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. MY LIFE WITH WAGNER chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood. Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner - from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. Next he takes each opera in turn, his appraisal illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure. The result is a richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.

Best remembered for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting a traditional account of Rossini's life and works, Benjamin Walton traces instead the shifting patterns of Rossinian criticism from before the composer's arrival in Paris to the end of the 1820s, outlining a type of musical history that uses immersion in a narrow time period as a way to reconceive the relationships between opera and the wider currents of life outside the opera house. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book argues for a composer whose music resonated with the experience of contemporary life, and was integrally bound up in the struggle to define French romanticism at the time.

During the July Monarchy, French grand operas, with their plots drawn from historical events, tended to be received as metaphors for current political themes. Previous studies have usually underestimated the role of music and the visual dimensions in articulating an alternative message to that offered by the libretto, and have instead focused on single political interpretations. In this study, five operas - Auber's La Muette de Portici and Gustave III, Niedermeyer's Stradella, Halevy's Charles VI and Meyerbeer's Le Prophete - illustrate the complex, contested nature of political meaning during this period. By setting these operas in the context of the emerging liberal historiography pioneered by Jules Michelet, and analysing the manner in which audiences and critics constructed 'meanings' with reference to their personal and collective experience and memories, this study reveals the central position that grand opera occupied in the period, bringing the past alive.

This comprehensive bibliography and research guide details all the works currently available on Vincenzo Bellini, the Italian opera composer best known for his work Norma, which is still regularly performed today at Covent Garden and by regional opera companies. 2001, the bicentennial anniversary of Bellini's death, saw several concerts and recordings of his work, raising his academic profile. This volume aims to meet the research needs of all students of Bellini in particular.

Exploring the dynamic yet problematic context of musical drama in Rome, this study probes opera's relationship to modernity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Opera instigated a range of discourses, most notably among Rome's Academy of Arcadians, whose apprehension towards opera refracted larger aesthetic and cultural debates, and socio-political tensions. Tcharos presents a unique perspective, engaging opera as a historical force that established a sphere of influence across several genres and matrices of culture. The juxtaposition of opera against the prominent forms of the oratorio, serenata and cantata illustrates opera's constitutive role in a trans-genre cultural matrix, where the dialogical connections between musico-dramatic forms vividly capture the historicism, nostalgia, contradiction and cultural reform that opera inspired. By illuminating other genres as reactionary sites of music and drama, Opera's Orbit boldly reconstructs opera's eighteenth-century critical turn.

Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698 1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726 1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 1 covers Metastasio's life from his early childhood until 1751, including his musical debut in Rome after his tutor's death, and the beginning of his career in Vienna.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726-1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 2 covers Metastasio's successful Viennese career from 1751 to 1770, and includes the bulk of his correspondence with his friend the famous castrato Farinelli.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726-1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 3 covers Metastasio's life and correspondence from 1770 until his death. It includes notes on Metastasio's style as well as separate chronologies of his secular dramas and oratorios.

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.

The beautifully illustrated pocket edition 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.

Few major artists have aroused the ire and adulation of successive generations as persistently as Richard Wagner. He was the centre of controversy during his lifetime and yet, when he died, he was the most idolized man in Germany. The situation has not changed much since then. Simon Williams explores the reasons for this adulation and antipathy by examining an aspect that may be a fundamental cause for this radical division in the reception of Wagner's work, the phenomenon of heroism. Williams analyses this heroism as a function of Wagner's theatre and music, beginning with a definition and examination of the concept of the heroic. The book also discusses all thirteen stage works by Wagner and the phenomenon of heroism and Wagner's adaptation of the figure of the Romantic hero. Williams offers a theatrical, musical, and cultural re-evaluation of one of the most enduring figures in the arts.

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Ceremonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films."

A collection of essays that explores the relationship between opera and the development of media technology from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Examining the subject from an international perspective, the contributing authors, all of whom have extensive experience as academics and/or practitioners, cover a variety of topics which include audio, video and film recording, contemporary critical responses, popular and "high brow" culture, live and recorded performance, lighting and performance technology, media marketing and advertising.

Through his reading of primary and secondary classical sources, as well as his theoretical writings, Richard Wagner developed a Hegelian-inspired theory linking the evolution of classical Greek politics and poetry. This book demonstrates how, by turning theory into practice, Wagner used this evolutionary paradigm to shape the music and the libretto of the Ring cycle. Foster describes how each of the Ring's operas represents a particular phase of Greek poetic and political development: Das Rheingold and Die Walkure create epic national identity in its earlier and later stages respectively; Siegfried expresses lyric personal identity; and Gotterdammerung destructively culminates with a tragi-comedy about civic identity. This study sees the Greeks through the lens of those scholars whose work influenced Wagner most, focusing on epic, lyric, and comedy, as well as Greek tragedy. Most significantly, the book interrogates the ways in which Wagner uses Greek aesthetics to further his own ideological goals.

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

This book is concerned not so much with the 'prima donna' as with prime donne: a group of working artists (sometimes famous but more often relatively unknown and now long forgotten) and the circumstances of their professional lives. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house - the social, cultural and political framing that shaped individual experience, artistic endeavour and audience reception. Rutherford addresses questions such as the multiple discourses on the image of the singer and their impact on the changing profile of the professional artist from figlia dell'arte at the beginning of the era to middle-class woman at the end; the aspect of the 'stage mother' and patronage; issues of vocal training and tuition; professional life in the operatic market-place; and performance (both vocal and dramatic) conventions and practices.

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

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.