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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
This is the first book for a century to explore the development of
French opera with spoken dialogue from its beginnings. Musical
comedy in this form came in different styles and formed a distinct
genre of opera, whose history has been obscured by neglect. Its
songs were performed in private homes, where operas themselves were
also given. The subject-matter was far wider in scope than is
normally thought, with news stories and political themes finding
their way onto the popular stage. In this book, David Charlton
describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century
popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's
theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the
mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience
experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a
pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical'
popular works.
Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the
careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John
Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and
production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative."
Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and
their interaction with music and sung texts contribute
significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's
study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian
psychoanalysis via Slavoj Zizek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's
notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert
Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original
interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.
Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville surveys the opera's
fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes
that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of
the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking
into account the range of reactions that these changes have
prompted in spectators and critics from the nineteenth century to
the present. Opening with a wide-ranging overview of the types of
alterations that have been imposed on Rossini's score for the past
two centuries, the first chapter addresses the mechanics behind
these changes as well as the cultural forces that both fostered and
encouraged them. The book next looks at some of the opera's
earliest revivals, drawing attention to alterations that were made
to the score and to individual singers who were responsible for the
changes, especially those who appeared in the roles of Almaviva and
Bartolo. An entire chapter is devoted to Rosina, examining the wide
array of creative liberties that prima donnas have unremittingly
and unrepentantly taken with their interpretations of Rossini's
character. The final sections turn to the opera's recent history,
observing how the Rossini Renaissance brought with it a new
dedication to the "work concept" and to shedding the types of
alterations that had long characterized performances of this work.
The book closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from
the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the myriad ways
that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its
recorded, digitized, and commodified glory.
Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to
celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of
France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive
complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto
by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini
have tended to be studied in the abstract rather than as something
to be performed in a specific time and place. Staging "Euridice"
explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely
reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room
for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti. By also taking into
account what the singers and instrumentalists did, what the
audience saw and heard, and how things changed from creation
through rehearsals to performance, this book brings new aspects of
Euridice to light in startling ways.
It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. "Siren
Songs" is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the
impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that
come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a
distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics,
and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating
topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in
Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to
the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific
scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly
and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both
formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that
traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he
creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for
the study of gender and opera.
The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which
provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in
operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a
foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and
history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clement,
a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the
evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian
subculture of "fin-de-siecle" Paris, the phenomenon of "opera
seria's" "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the
family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in
Verdi's "Don Carlos, " and a collaborative discussion of the
staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's
operas.
The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner,
Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement,
Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and
Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann
Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock."
The DVD Book of Pavarotti covers the life of this preeminent
opera singer, from his first performances at the age of five, to
his parents, to televised concerts he gave singing in stadiums and
great open spaces such as La Bombonera in Buenos Aires and Hyde
Park.
Long before the satirical comedy of The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report, the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were
the hottest send-ups of the day's political and cultural
obsessions. Gilbert and Sullivan's productions always rose to the
level of social commentary, despite being impertinent, absurd, or
inane. Some viewers may take them straight, but what looks like
sexism or stereotype was actually a clever strategy of critique.
Parody was a powerful weapon in the culture wars of
late-nineteenth-century England, and with defiantly in-your-face
sophistication, Gilbert and Sullivan proved that popular culture
can be intellectually as well as politically challenging. Carolyn
Williams underscores Gilbert and Sullivan's creative and acute
understanding of cultural formations. Her unique perspective shows
how anxiety drives the troubled mind in the Lord Chancellor's
"Nightmare Song" in Iolanthe and is vividly realized in the sexual
and economic phrasing of the song's patter lyrics. The modern body
appears automated and performative in the "Junction Song" in
Thespis, anticipating Charlie Chaplin's factory worker in Modern
Times. Williams also illuminates the use of magic in The Sorcerer,
the parody of nautical melodrama in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ridicule
of Victorian aesthetic and idyllic poetry in Patience, the
autoethnography of The Mikado, the role of gender in Trial by Jury,
and the theme of illegitimacy in The Pirates of Penzance. With her
provocative reinterpretation of these artists and their work,
Williams recasts our understanding of creativity in the late
nineteenth century.
The bewildering world of opera made manageable
Covering the most popular and most performed operas from the
earliest classics to the present day, this concise edition of "The
New Penguin Opera Guide" is an ideal reference for anyone who is
entranced by opera, whether aficionado or novice.
? Explores the operatic careers of all the great composers
? Describes their operas in detail
? Notes the best recordings
Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be
little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little
(and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in
bringing an opera to life - by the stagehands who shift scenery,
the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians
who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and
the singers to their places during the performance. The first
comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera
production and staging, "From the Score to the Stage" follows the
evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from
its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty
prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved
in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who
creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the
singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers
and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people -
composers, librettists, designers, and technicians - as well as the
theaters and events that generated developments in opera
production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in
performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business
of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected
history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology,
and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical
aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the
social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise
illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new
light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with
nearly two hundred color illustrations, "From the Score to the
Stage" is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens
before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.
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