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

Would you take Verdi's advice on how to write an opera? What happened to Caruso in the San Francisco earthquake? There are tales both funny and informative in this delightful collection - a `must' for all opera fans.

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.

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.

Professor Kimbell's classic study illuminates the first fifteen years of Verdi's composing career, the era that culminated in his trio of masterpieces, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata. Verdi had become an acknowledged master of the peculiar brand of Romanticism that flourished in Italy in the 1830s and 40s; this background is examined in its political, social and literary light, and his consequent transformation of Italian operatic conventions is analysed. The four parts of Professor Kimbell's book range over biographical, documentary, literary and close-analytical ground. Attention is given to individual operas in order to show how Verdi assimilated and developed the Romantic tradition in his work.

What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.

This new imprint is established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press's most outstanding original monographs. These are titles that would normally appear only in hardback editions for specialists, but whose quality and general academic importance justify their special promotion in this prestige imprint. The series will include both new and recent titles drawn from the whole range of the Press's very substantial publishing programs in the humanities and social sciences, and therefore represents some of the best current scholarship in the English language.

Originally published in 1981, this is a one-volume paperback edition of Dr von Westernhagen's distinguished biography, first published in English by Cambridge University Press as a hardcover edition in two volumes. Its distinction was that it made use of fresh archive material, and took as its starting point the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry. Dr von Westerhagen quotes extensively from letters and diaries to throw light, for example, on Wagner's estrangement from Nietzsche. The author also consulted the contents of the composer's Dresden library and teenage composition exercises written for his teacher, Theodor Weinlig, to establish early influences upon him. Particularly useful features of this study are the appendices which include a chronological summary of Wagner's life, a complete list of his musical and literary compositions and a large bibliography. This is a definitive biography which stands beside Newman's classic work as an indispensable reference book for all studies of Wagner.

This book was first published in hard covers in 1976 to mark the centenary of the birth of Edward J. Dent, now best remembered as translator of Mozart's opera libretti, as author of the best-known popular introductory book, Opera (Penguin) and for his book on Mozart's Operas (Oxford). He was a scholar of great range and wrote with style and wit. For many years he was professor of Music at Cambridge. Deriving from a course of previously unpublished lectures, the book concentrates on the crucial romantic period and shows how romantic opera had its origins not in Germany, as is often thought, but in the music-dramas and operas of revolutionary France and that this music was a source of nineteenth-century German symphonic style as well as of grand opera. The book is edited by Winton Dean who supplied a brief introduction and a number of notes incorporating relevant scholarship.

During the 19th century, Italian opera became truly transatlantic and its rapid expansion is one of the most exciting new areas of study in music and the performing arts. Beyond the Atlantic coasts, opera searched for new spaces to expand its reach. This Element discusses about the Italian opera in Andean countries like Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia during the 1840s and focuses on opera as a product that both challenged and was challenged in the Andes by other forms of performing arts, behaviours, technologies, material realities, and business models.

John Adams's opera, Nixon in China, is one of the most frequently performed operas in the contemporary literature. Timothy A. Johnson illuminates the opera and enhances listeners' and scholars' appreciation for this landmark work. This music-analytical guide presents a detailed, in-depth analysis of the music tied to historical and political contexts. The opera captures an important moment in history and in international relations, and a close study of it from an interdisciplinary perspective provides fresh, compelling insights about the opera. The music analysis takes a neo-Riemannian approach to harmony and to large-scale harmonic connections. Musical metaphors drawn between harmonies and their dramatic contexts enrich this approach. Motivic analysis reveals interweaving associations between the characters, based on melodic content. Analysis of rhythm and meter focuses on Adams's frequent use of grouping and displacement dissonances to propel the music forward or to illustrate the libretto. The book shows how the historical depiction in the opera is accurate, yet enriched by this operatic adaptation. The language of the opera is true to its source, but more evocative than the words spoken in 1972-due to Alice Goodman's marvelous, poetic libretto. And the music transcends its repetitive shell to become a hierarchically-rich and musically-compelling achievement.

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.

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.

Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688-89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which a limited amount of documentation survives, Walkling argues that our understanding of the distinctions between masque and opera must be premised upon a thorough knowledge of theatrical context and performance circumstances. Using extensive archival and literary evidence, detailed textual readings, rigorous tabular analysis, and meticulous collation of bibliographical and musical sources, this interdisciplinary study offers a host of new insights into a body of work that has long been of interest to musicologists, theatre historians, literary scholars and historians of Restoration court and political culture, but which has hitherto been imperfectly understood. A companion volume will explore the phenomenon of "dramatick opera" and its precursors on London's public stages between the early 1660s and the first decade of the eighteenth century.

The popularity of Carmen endures across generations and continents, with one of the most frequently performed and instantly recognizable operatic scores of all time and a libretto derived from Prosper Merimee's novella of the same name, written 30 years prior to the opera's 1875 debut. In Georges Bizet's Carmen-the latest volume in the Oxford Keynotes series-author Nelly Furman explores the evolution of Carmen's story and its meaning, illuminating how the titular heroine has maintained her status as a universally recognizable cultural icon. Grounded in Ludovic Halevy's and Henri Meilhac's libretto-and drawing on a wealth of mostly French critical theory-this book traces the textual, operatic, and cinematic tellings and retellings of the story, from its success as a novella in the industrial age through to its iconic position in our own cinematic era. As Furman delicately navigates the fraught terrain of racial and gendered discourse and ideology that Bizet's setting of Merimee's work traverses, she uncovers the elements of the story that give it cultural salience and resonance, both in its own right and in support of Bizet's acclaimed musical score. In doing so, Furman reveals how past and present renderings of the Carmen tale mirror the changing concerns and shifting values of individual authors and their societies-and how each new rendering has helped to embed Carmen into the global conscience.

David Cairns--winner of the Whitbread Biography Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction--has spent his life immersed in Mozart's music, both as a performer and as a listener. This intimate biography sheds new and important light on the composer by placing his operas in the context of his life and his complete musical output. Mozart's unusual childhood as a musical prodigy touring Europe as a performer from an early age is well known. But even more remarkable is that the genius grew up to produce works of increasing maturity and originality. Cairns unravels the many myths surrounding Mozart to reveal the opinionated, passionate, and exceptionally intelligent man behind the legend. Cairns shows that familiarity with the operas can transform our perception of Mozart's art. He demonstrates that the composer's approach to composition was that of a consummate dramatist. Using the operas as his guide, he traces the steady deepening of Mozart's musical style from his beginnings as a child prodigy, through his coming of age with, in Cairns's opinion, the most Romantic and forward-looking of all Mozart's operas, Idomeneo. He discusses Mozart's later genius as displayed in the three comic operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte, and in The Magic Flute, the final and greatest triumph of his career.

The representation of non-Western cultures in opera has long been a focus of critical inquiry. Within this field, the diverse relationships between opera and First Nations and Indigenous cultures, however, have received far less attention. Opera Indigene takes this subject as its focus, addressing the changing historical depictions of Indigenous cultures in opera and the more contemporary practices of Indigenous and First Nations artists. The use of 're/presenting' in the title signals an important distinction between how representations of Indigenous identity have been constructed in operatic history and how Indigenous artists have more recently utilized opera as an interface to present and develop their cultural practices. This volume explores how operas on Indigenous subjects reflect the evolving relationships between Indigenous peoples, the colonizing forces of imperial power, and forms of internal colonization in developing nation-states. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, ethnomusicology, cultural geography and critical discourses on nationalism and multiculturalism, the collection brings together experts on opera and music in Canada, the Americas and Australia in a stimulating comparative study of operatic re/presentation.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

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.

Beijing Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture illuminates the links between theatrical attire and social customs and aesthetics of China, covering both the theory and practice of stage dress. Distinguishing attributes include an introduction to the performance style, the delineation of the costume conventions, an analysis of the costumes through their historical precedents and theatrical modifications, and the use of garment shape, color, and embroidery for symbolic effect. Practical information covers dressing the performers and a costume plot, the design and creation of the make-up and hairstyles, and pattern drafts of the major garments. Photographs from live performances, as well as details of embroidery, and close-up photographs of the headdresses thoroughly portray the stunning beauty of this incomparable performance style. Presenting the brilliant colors of the elaborately embroidered silk costumes together with the intricate makeup and glittering headdresses, this volume embodies the elegance of the Beijing opera.

It brings together a substantial group of essays by an international team of scholars on a wide range of aspects of Rameau's operas. The individual essays are informed by a variety of disciplines or sub-disciplines - literature, archival studies, musical analysis, gender studies, ballet and choreography, dramaturgy and staging. The contents are addressed to a wide readership, including not only scholars but also practical musicians, stage directors, dancers and choreographers.

Internationally acclaimed mezzo soprano, Laurie Rubin, shares that colours affect everyone through sound, smell, taste and a vast array of emotions and atmospheres. In Rubin's inspiring memoir, she looks back on the loneliness and isolation of being a blind teenager in Southern California and the amazing life experiences that led to her career as a renowned solo and opera performer.