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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme is one of the most frequently performed
operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? In this
book, author Alexandra Wilson traces La Boheme's rise to fame and
demonstrates that its success grew steadily through stage
performances, recordings, filmed versions and the endorsements of
star singers. More recently, popular songs, film soundtracks and
musicals that draw on the opera's music and themes added further to
its immense cultural impact. This cultural history offers a fresh
reading of a familiar work. Wilson argues that La Boheme's approach
to realism and its flouting of conventions of the Italian operatic
tradition made it strikingly modern for the 1890s. She explores how
Puccini and his librettists engaged with gender, urban poverty and
nostalgia-themes that grew out of the work's own time and continue
to resonate with audiences more than 120 years later. Her analysis
of the opera's depiction of Paris reveals that La Boheme was not
only influenced by the romantic mythologies surrounding the city to
this day but also helped shape them. Wilson's consideration of how
directors have reinvented this opera for a new age completes this
fascinating history of La Boheme, making it essential reading for
anyone interested in this opera and the works it inspired.
Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism,
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was better known in the nineteenth
century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating
study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how
Wagner's obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of
operas such as Tannhauser, Die Walkure, Tristan und Isolde, and
Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate
ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense
reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche,
and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was
transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the
cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art,
especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to
Schopenhauer's "metaphysics of sexual love." A reluctant eroticist,
Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin
and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously
incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his
librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard
for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his
operas. In the end, Wagner's achievement was to have fashioned an
oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it
conveyed-as never before-how music could act on erotic impulse.
In this groundbreaking survey of the fundamentals, methods, and
formulas that were taught at Italian music conservatories during
the 19th century, Nicholas Baragwanath explores the compositional
significance of tradition in Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi,
Boito, and, most importantly, Puccini. Taking account of some 400
primary sources, Baragwanath explains the varying theories and
practices of the period in light of current theoretical and
analytical conceptions of this music. The Italian Traditions and
Puccini offers a guide to an informed interpretation and
appreciation of Italian opera by underscoring the proximity of
archaic traditions to the music of Puccini.
'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.
This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper
who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the
Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them
centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century.
Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them
Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten,
and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not
only a long marriage and numerous private and professional
vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in
the visual arts, literature and music. Frances Spalding also sheds
new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle
of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry
until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in
England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day
and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry
Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political
situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John
Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging,
history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues
that are very much to the fore in today's world. Myfanwy Piper is
best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as
librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily
prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over
six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been
an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his
landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core
interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built
environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost
everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined
cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is
nowadays called industrial archeology. His capacious and divided
sensibility made him defender of many aspects of the English
landscape and the built environment, while in his art he became an
heir of that great tradition encompassing Wordsworth and Blake,
Turner, Ruskin, and Samuel Palmer. He was torn between the
pleasures of an abstract language liberated from time and place and
those embedded in the locale, in buildings, geography, and history.
Today, this expansive contradictoriness seems quintessentially
modern, his divided response finding an echo in our own ambivalence
towards modernity. Both Pipers created what seemed to many
observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships,
good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work, and creativity.
Running through their lives is a fertile tension between a
commitment to the new and a desire to reinvigorate certain native
traditions. This tension produced work that is passionate and
experimental. 'Only those who live most vividly in the present',
John Russell observed of John and Myfanwy Piper, 'deserve to
inherit the past'.
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