In mid seventeenth-century Venice, opera first emerged from courts and private drawing rooms to become a form of public entertainment. Early commercial operas were elaborate spectacles, featuring ornate costumes and set design along with dancing and music. As ambitious works of theater, these productions required not only significant financial backing, but also strong managers to oversee several months of rehearsals and performances. These impresarios were responsible for every facet of production from contracting the cast to balancing the books at season's end. The systems they created still survive, in part, today.
Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, from 1637 to 1677, when theater owners and impresarios established Venice as the operatic capital of Europe. Drawing on extensive new documentation, the book studies all of the components necessary to opera production, from the financial backing of various populations of Venice, to the commissioning and creation of the libretto and the score; the recruitment and employment of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists; the production of the scenery and the costumes, and, the nature of the audience; and, finally, the issue of patronage. Throughout the book, the problems faced by impresarios come into new focus. The authors chronicle the progress of Marco Faustini, the impresario most well known today, who made his way from one of Venice's smallest theaters to one of the largest. His companies provide the most personal view of an impresario and his partners, who ranged from Venetian nobles to artisans. Throughout the book, Venice emerges as a city that prized novelty over economy, with new repertory, scenery, costumes, and expensive singers the rule rather than the exception. The authors examine the challenges faced by four separate Venetian theaters during the seventeenth century: San Cassiano, the first opera theater, the Novissimo, the small Sant'Aponal, and San Luca, established in 1660. Only two of them would survive past the 1650s.
Through close examination of an extraordinary cache of documents--including personal papers, account books, and correspondence -- Beth and Jonathan Glixon provide a comprehensive view of opera production in mid-seventeenth century Venice. For the first time in a study of opera, an emphasis is placed on the physical production -- the scenery, costumes, and stage machinery -- that tied these opera productions to the social and economic life of the city. This original and meticulously researched study will be of strong interest to all students of opera and its history.

Theater music directors must draw on a remarkably broad range of musical skills. Not only do they conduct during rehearsals and performances, but they must also be adept arrangers, choral directors, vocal coaches, and accompanists. Like a record producer, the successful music director must have the flexibility to adjust as needed to a multifaceted job description, one which changes with each production and often with each performer. In Music Direction for the Stage, veteran music director and instructor Joseph Church demystifies the job in a book that offers aspiring and practicing music directors the practical tips and instruction they need in order to mount a successful musical production. Church, one of Broadway's foremost music directors, emerges from the orchestra pit to tell how the music is put into a musical show. He gives particular attention to the music itself, explaining how a music director can best plan the task of learning, analyzing, and teaching each new piece. Based on his years of professional experience, he offers a practical discussion of a music director's methods of analyzing, learning, and practicing a score, thoroughly illustrated by examples from the repertoire. The book also describes how a music director can effectively approach dramatic and choreographic rehearsals, including key tips on cueing music to dialogue and staging, determining incidental music and underscoring, making musical adjustments and revisions in rehearsal, and adjusting style and tempo to performers' needs. A key theme of the book is effective collaboration with other professionals, from the production team to the creative team to the performers themselves, all grounded in Church's real-world experience with professional, amateur, and even student performances. He concludes with a look at music direction as a career, offering invaluable advice on how the enterprising music director can find work and gain standing in the field.

Written more than a century ago and initially regarded even by their creators as nothing more than light entertainment, the fourteen operas of Gilbert & Sullivan emerged over the course of the twentieth century as the world's most popular body of musical-theater works, ranking second only to Shakespeare in the history of English-language theater.
Despite this resounding popularity and proven longevity, most books written about the duo have focused on the authors rather than the works. With this detailed examination of all fourteen operas, Gayden Wren fills the void. His bold thesis finds the key to the operas' longevity, not in the clever lyrics, witty dialogue, or catchy music, but in the central themes underlying the characters and stories themselves. Like Shakespeare's comedies, Wren shows, the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan endure because of their timeless themes, which speak to audiences as powerfully now as they did the first time they were performed.
Written out of an abiding love for the Savoy operas, this volume is essential reading for any devotee of these enchanting works, or indeed for anyone who loves musical theater.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colorful account of such operatic favorites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgr lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus.

A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

"One of the great artists of our time."
––Luciano Pavarotti

"A treasure in the world of opera."
––Plácido Domingo

"We are fortunate to have this book about an artist whom it has been my great honor to have known and worked with since my youngest days. Not only will Verdi’s Lux aeterna remain imbedded in my musical memories forever as Shirley Verrett first sang it in Los Angeles, but so will our last music-making together, the recording of Il Trovatore. It seemed to round off a perfect relationship between two friends who have musically complemented each other for years."
–Zubin Mehta

"My collaboration with Shirley Verrett dates back to when I conducted Verdi’s Don Carlo at Covent Garden and she sang her first Eboli with resounding success. Another even more difficult Verdi role brought her an even greater triumph. It had taken me some years to persuade her to try Lady Macbeth, and she electrified Europe as she sang the part for the first time at La Scala di Milano. After the opening, the crowd was so enthusiastic that we thought Shirley might have to spend the night at the theater, signing autographs. These are only highlights. Shirley Verrett is a wonderful musician, a great artist, and a dear friend. It gives me great pleasure to add these few words to celebrate her autobiography."
–Claudio Abbado

No musical partnership has enjoyed greater success during its time span, or bequeathed a more powerful and enduring legacy, than that of Gilbert and Sullivan in the later nineteenth century. Even before their first successful collaboration in 1875, both William Schwenk Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900) had already forged considerable reputations for themselves. Thereafter, between 1877 and 1896, Gilbert wrote the librettos, and Sullivan the music, for no fewer than a dozen Savoy operas, among them the still regularly performed 'H.M.S. Pinafore' (1878), 'The Pirates of Penzance' (1879), 'Iolanthe' (1882), 'The Mikado' (1885), 'The Yeomen of the Guard' (1888) and 'The Gondoliers' (1889). Not only are the plots ingenious, the lyrics witty and the music compelling, the operas also present modern audiences with splendidly rich and satirical evocations of Victorian England and its society: the prime subject matter of this book!

This illustrated study is a resource for opera scholars, opera workers and opera lovers. It explores the field of opera studies in three ways: Through history: Opera North is presented through a historical lens within the UK operatic landscape. The chapter amalgamates extensive archival resources and interview material, including many illustrations from its 35 year history. Through ethnography: the day-to-day workplace behaviour of an opera company is explored in its rehearsal and performance spaces, and the production cycle from first music rehearsal to first night is traced through detailed observation and photographic records. Through production analysis: selected productions of recent years are given a dramaturgical focus, with aspects of conceptual, textual and visual analysis. Opera North was founded as English National Opera North in 1978. It became independent from English National Opera in 1981 and holds a reputation for fostering artistic talent, for adventurous programming choices and for high production values. This study explores universal issues relating to the production of opera, based on the very specific example of our National Opera Company in the North.

A biography of composer Jacques Offenbach that is also a social and cultural history of Second Empire Paris. Siegfried Kracauer's biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach is a remarkable work of social and cultural history. First published in German in 1937 and in English translation in 1938, the book uses the life and work of Offenbach as a focal point for a broad and penetrating portrayal of Second Empire Paris. Offenbach's immensely popular operettas have long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism that pervaded Paris in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach's productions must be understood as more than glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of such operettas as La Belle Helene were as one with the unreality of Napoleon III's imperial masquerade, but they also made a mockery of the pomp and pretense surrounding the apparatuses of power. At the same time, Offenbach's dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of the times. This edition includes Kracauer's preface to the original German edition as well as a critical foreword by Gertrud Koch.

While no one would dispute Wagner's ranking among the most significant composers in the history of Western music, his works have been more fiercely attacked than those of any other composer. Alleged to be an unscrupulous womanizer and megalomaniac, undeniably a racist, Wagner's personal qualities and attitudes have often provoked, and continue to provoke, intense hostility that has translated into a mistrust and abhorrence of his music.

In this emphatic, lucid book, Michael Tanner discusses why people feel so passionately about Wagner, for or against, in a way that they do not about other artists who had personal traits no less lamentable than those he is thought to have possessed. Tanner lays out the various arguments made by Wagner's detractors and admirers, and challenges most of them. The author's fascination for the relationships among music, text, and plot generates an illuminating discussion of the operas, in which he persuades us to see many of Wagner's best-known works anew--"The Ring Cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal." He refrains from lengthy and detailed musical examination, giving instead passionate and unconventional analyses that are accessible to all lovers of music, be they listeners or performers.

In this fiery reassessment of one of the greatest composers in the history of opera, Tanner presents one of the most intelligent and controversial portraits of Wagner to emerge for many years.

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it-his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protege Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

The Story of Opera explores the centuries-old tradition in which the emotional power of music is linked to the human issues that can be enacted as stories. The first part, "Going to the Opera," introduces newcomers to every element of the operatic experience-venues, seating arrangements, dress and costumes, stage effects, orchestra, singers, and dancers-describing how each began and changed over the years, and how they have all combined to enthrall audiences for four centuries. The remaining parts explore operatic repertory from the 17th century to the present, providing insightful readings of plots, particular scenes, staging, and music.

'..the news that Baritone Richard Suart has produced an account of Ko-Ko's Little Lists will be music to your ears. Beginning with a brief history of The Mikado, this hearty collaboration focuses on the way contemporary politics and society are freshly lampooned in each season's book' - Sunday Telegraph Richard Suart, heir to the great Gilbert and Sullivan singers of the past, has made the role of KoKo, Lord High Executioner, his own. Over the last 20 years his topical version of the Little List song has become a focus of audience expectation and hilarity. In this book, he looks back over the Lists that have raised such laughter at the Coliseum and at the history of this immensely malleable song, taking in previous performers such as George Grossmith, Martyn Green, Groucho Marx, Frankie Howerd and Eric Idle -not to mention poets as varied as John Hollander and Tim Rice. Illustrated with 56 colour and 45 b/w illustrations, many never previously reproduced, this is a delightful biography of one of the most entertaining songs in the English language.

The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History extends the growing interdisciplinary conversation in opera studies by drawing on new research in performance studies and the philosophy of history. Moving beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of opera, this book argues for opera's powerful potential for historical impact and engagement in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by American composers. Considering opera's ability to serve as a vehicle for memory, historical experience, affect, presence, and the historical sublime, this volume demonstrates how opera's ability to represent and evoke historical events and historical experience differs fundamentally from the representations and recreations of other modes (specifically, literary and dramatic representations). Building on the work of performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, and in consultation with recent debates in the philosophy of history, the book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers, particularly those working in the areas of opera studies and performance studies.

Pick A Chord follows the ethos of Weedon's hugely influential Play In A Day book and DVD, giving guitarists the tools needed to start playing from day one. An essential chord dictionary that every guitarist should have in their gigbag, it contains basic major/minor chords for the beginner through to extended/jazz chords for the advanced player. Unlike other chord dictionaries Pick A Chord gives invaluable advice on rhythm, major/minor chord definition, barre chords and the 12 bar blues, making Weedon's 'short-cut' method to playing guitar as simple and engaging as possible.

This investigation offers new perspectives on Giuseppe Verdi's attitudes to women and the functions which they fulfilled for him. The book explores Verdi's professional and personal relationship with women who were exceptional within the traditional socio-sexual structure of patria potesta, in the context of women's changing status in nineteenth-century Italian society. It focusses on two women; the singers Giuseppina Strepponi, who supported and enhanced Verdi's creativity at the beginning of his professional life and Teresa Stolz, who sustained his sense of self-worth at its end. Each was an essential emotional benefactor without whom Verdi's career would not have been the same. The subject of the Strepponi-Verdi marriage and the impact of Strepponi's past deserve further detailed and nuanced discussion. This book demonstrates Verdi's shifting power-balance with Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. The negative stereotypes concerning operatic 'divas' do not withstand scrutiny when applied either to Strepponi or to Stolz. This book presents a revisionist appraisal of Stolz through close examination of her letters. Revealing Stolz's value to Verdi, they also provide contemporary operatic criticism and behind-the-scenes comment, some excerpts of which are published here in English for the first time.

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.

Bel canto singing was a historical phenomenon which embraced the Italian opera of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a translation of Rudolfo Celletti's `Storia del Belcanto', which offers a fascinating history of bel canto singing and the voice in operatic literature.

Elektra was the fourth of fifteen operas by Strauss and opened his successful partnership with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is one of the most important operas of the early twentieth century and it solidified Strauss's status as the leading German opera-composer of his day. Bryan Gilliam's study of this major work examines its musical-historical context and also provides a detailed analysis of some of its musical features. He establishes a chronology of the evolution of the opera and places it in the larger framework of German opera of the time. His detailed examination of the sketch-books enables him to offer fresh insight into Strauss's use of motifs and overall tonal structure. In so doing he shows how the work's arresting dissonance and chromaticism has hidden its similarities to his later, seemingly more tonally conservative opera, Der Rosenkavalier - not only does Strauss in both operas exploit a variety of musical styles to express irony, parody, and other emotions, but both are in fact thoroughly tonal.

In this book, Warren Darcy traces the compositional genesis of Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, the first opera of his great operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. He also attempts a comprehensive formal and tonal analysis of the piece. Basing his work upon Wagner's textual and musical manuscripts, he employs the most up-to-date analytical techniques.

Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan created fourteen comic operas - witty satires set to sparkling music - that instantly won a large and enthusiastic audience and remain immensely popular today. Their talents brought the two men together and their temperaments finally drove them apart. Here, in forty interviews and recollections, is a record of what was said about them during and shortly after their lifetimes by friends, musicians, theatrical managers, singers, actors, and actresses, journalists and authors. For Gilbert and Sullivan devotees everywhere, this entertaining collection will provide fresh insights into the careers and collaborative achievements of one of the most successful - and enduring - enterprises of Victorian theatre.

Music examples and charts illustrate the analyses, and each essay is fully annotated by the editor. In some cases, the results of original research by the editor or by others working in the field are published here for the first time. Much of the material has never before appeared in English.

A score embodying the best available musical text.

Historical background-what is known of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the work, including (where relevant) original source material.

A detailed analysis of the music, by the editor of the volume or another well-known scholar.

Other significant analytic essays and critical comments, exposing the student to a variety of opinions about the music.

Throughout his life, German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill was fascinated by the idea of America. His European works depict America as a Capitalist dystopia. But in 1935, it became clear that Europe was no longer safe for Weill, and he set sail for New World, and his engagement with American culture shifted. From that point forward, most of his works concerned the idea of "America," whether celebrating her successes, or critiquing her shortcomings. As an outsider-turned-insider, Weill's insights into American culture were unique. He was keenly attuned to the difficult relationship America had with her immigrants, but was slower to grasp the subtleties of others, particularly those surrounding race relations, even though his works reveal that he was devoted to the idea of racial equality. The book treats Weill as a node in a transnational network of musicians, writers, artists, and other stage professionals, all of whom influenced each other. Weill sought out partners from a range of different sectors, including the Popular Front, spoken drama, and the commercial Broadway stage. His personal papers reveal his attempts to navigate not only the shifting tides of American culture, but the specific demands of his institutional and individual collaborators. In reframing Weill's relationship with immigration and nationality, the book also puts nuance contemporary ideas about the relationships of immigrants to their new homes, moving beyond ideas that such figures must either assimilate and abandon their previous identities, or resist the pull of their new home and stay true to their original culture.

This collection of 8 essays introduces literary and cultural theorists into the domain of operatic textual analysis, long the exclusive preserve of musicologists. The contributors include some of the most distinguished critics of the past 30 years, most of them writing about opera for the first time.