Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas,including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Salle" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.

This book charts the life of Arthur Sullivan-the best loved and most widely performed British composer in history. While he is best known for his comic opera collaborations with W. S. Gilbert, it was his substantial corpus of sacred music which meant most to him and for which he wanted to be remembered. His upbringing and training in church music, and his own religious beliefs, substantially affected both his compositions for the theatre and his more serious work, which included oratorios, cantatas, sacred ballads, liturgical pieces, and hymns. Focusing on the spiritual aspects of Sullivan's life-which included several years as a church organist, involvement in Freemasonry, and an undying attachment to Anglican church music-Ian Bradley uses hitherto undiscovered letters, diary entries, and other sources to reveal the important influences on his faith and his work. No saint and certainly no ascetic, he was a lover of life and enjoyed its pleasures to the full. At the same time, he had a rare spiritual sensitivity, a sincere Christian faith, and a unique ability to uplift through both his character and his music that can best be described as a quality of divine emollient.

Amanda Glauert revisits Beethoven's songs and studies his profound engagement with the aesthetics of the poets he was setting, particularly those of Herder and Goethe. The book offers readers a rich exploration of the poetical and philosophical context in which Beethoven found himself when composing songs. It also offers detailed commentaries on possible responses to specific songs, responses designed to open up new ways for performing, hearing and appreciating this provocative song repertoire. This study will be of great interest to researchers of Beethoven; German song; aesthetics of words and music.

What makes an opera singer? And where in the making of a performance is the identity of the singer themselves? Linda Kitchen goes behind the scenes with prominent voices who have valuable insight about the world of opera, discussing what it means to be a performer, how they got into the profession and how who they are affects how they perform. Illustrated with photos of the artists in places that lend meaning to their lives by renowned photographer Nobby Clark.

How did "voice" become a metaphor for selfhood in the Western imagination? The Lyric Myth of Voice situates the emergence of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity in late eighteenth-century Italy, where long-standing political anxieties and new notions of cultural enlightenment collided in the mythical figure of the lyric poet-singer. Ultimately, music and literature together shaped the singing voice into a tool for civilizing modern Italian subjects. Drawing on a range of approaches and frameworks from historical musicology to gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, and literary theory, Jessica Gabriel Peritz shows how this ancient yet modern myth of voice attained interpretable form, flesh, and sound. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This Futurist opera was presented in snowy Petrograd in December 1913 to a riotous audience. The atonal music composed by Mikhail Matiushin accompanied the alogical libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh, the action taking place in the 10th Land where "the windows of houses all face inside" and "all the paths go up to the earth", while the hands of a clock "both go backwards immediately before dinner". The cardboard costumes by Kazimir Malevich were surfaces lit by his roving coloured spotlights, the characters bigger than life. This first English translation by Dr. Evgeny Steiner is accompanied by the Russian facsimile, followed by what is known of the musical score by Mikhail Matiushin, and a selection of Malevich's Cubist costume designs. Contemporary documents, from statements by the artists and photographs, to press reviews complete the contents of Vol. 1. Vol. 2 is a collection of scholarly essays on the Russian Futurist arts of language, music and performance, with Kruchenykh's own contribution to the "New Ways of the Word" first published in 1913. Together, this two volume collection of Victory Over the Sun presents Russian Futurism in all its guises. It is a tool for study, while it invites recreations of it today by theatre groups and those interested in the arts of language.

A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification. Opera's role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically "Italian" sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians' social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera's encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.

During the middle phase of his career, 1849-59, Verdi adopted new compositional procedures to create some of his best-loved and most-performed works. Focusing on the operas he composed during this period, this volume explores Verdi's work from three interlinked perspectives: studies of the original source material, cross-disciplinary analyses of musical and textual issues, and the relationship of performance practice to Verdi's musical and dramatic conception.
In addition to offering new insights into such staples as "Il trovatore," "La traviata," and "Un ballo in maschera," "Verdi's Middle Period" also highlights works which have only recently begun to re-enter public consciousness, such as "Stiffelio," as well as lesser-known works such as "Luisa Miller" and "Les Vepres siciliennes," Comprising major essays by some of the best-known Verdians of our day, as well as articles from up-and-coming scholars, this volume has much to offer readers ranging from musicologists to serious opera buffs.
Contributors are Martin Chusid, Markus Engelhardt, Linda B. Fairtile, Philip Gossett, Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, Elizabeth Hudson, James Hepokoski, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Carlo Matteo Mossa, Roger Parker, Harold S. Powers, David Rosen, and Mary Ann Smart.

The first book about Elliott Carter's only opera--or indeed about any single work by this still-productive modern master. In 1997, the eminent American composer Elliott Carter teamed with British music critic/librettist Paul Griffiths to create the one-act opera What Next? Hailed by the New York Times as "theatrically dynamic" and "poignant," the opera explores how six people work together to emerge from the wreckage of an accident. Today, What Next? enjoys a prominent position in Carter's celebrated "late late" compositional period. In the firstbook to focus exclusively on one Carter composition, Guy Capuzzo uses the metaphors of communication, cooperation, and separation to trace the dramatic arc of What Next? Through an approach that places stage action, words,and music on equal footing, Capuzzo's readings of four excerpts from the opera reveal the inner workings of Carter and Griffiths's tragicomedy. Elliott Carter's "What Next?": Communication, Cooperation, and Separation sheds light on a significant work by a major figure in twentieth-century concert music and will be of interest to all who study American music, vocal music, and musical criticism. Guy Capuzzo is associate professor of music theory at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro.

Susie Gilbert traces the development of ENO from its earliest origins in the darkest Victorian slums of the Cut, where it was conceived as a vehicle of social reform, through two world wars, and via Sadler's Wells to its great glory days at the Coliseum and beyond. Setting the company's artistic achievements within the wider context of social and political attitudes to the arts and the ever-changing theatrical style, Gilbert provides a vivid cultural history of this unique institution's 150 years. Inspired by the idealism of Lilian Baylis, the company has been based on the belief that opera in the vernacular can not only reach out to even the least privileged members of society but also create a potent and immediate communication with its audience. With full access to ENO's archive, Gilbert has unearthed a rich range of material and held numerous interviews with a fascinating array of personalities, to weave an absorbing tale of life both in front and behind the scenes of ENO as it developed over the years.

Photographer Monika Rittershaus is regarded as an inspiring interpreter of today's musical theatre in all its diversity, opulence, and drama, but also in its human profundity, uniqueness, and veracity. As a highly sensitive observer, she looks out over the on-stage activity, uncovering gentle, touching, and peripheral moments. Barrie Kosky: "I have often observed Monika at work through the corner of my eye as I sit behind the production desk ... She seems to sense the inner world of a moment and to know at exactly the right moment when to click her camera." In her highly stringent visual compositions, Rittershaus depicts in a personalized and decisive way many influential directors and operas such as: DAS RHEINGOLD, Richard Wagner, Los Angeles Opera (2009), director: Achim Freyer COSI FAN TUTTE, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salzburger Festspiele (2020), director: Christof Loy TANNHAEUSER, Richard Wagner, De Nationale Opera, Amsterdam (2019), director: Christof Loy CARMEN, Georges Bizet, Oper Frankfurt (2016), director: Barrie Kosky SALOME, Richard Strauss, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow (2021), director: Claus Guth ELEKTRA, Richard Strauss, Staatsoper Hamburg (2022), director: Dmitri Tcherniakov IPHIGENIE EN TAURIDE, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Opernhaus Zurich (2020), director: Andreas Homoki CENDRILLON, Jules Massenet, Opera National de Paris Bastille (2022), director: Mariame Clement Text in English and German.

In this book, Eugene J. Johnson traces the invention of the opera house, a building type of world wide importance. Italy laid the foundation theater buildings in the West, in architectural spaces invented for the commedia dell'arte in the sixteenth century, and theaters built to present the new art form of opera in the seventeenth. Rulers lavished enormous funds on these structures. Often they were among the most expensive artistic undertakings of a given prince. They were part of an upsurge of theatrical invention in the performing arts. At the same time, the productions that took place within the opera house could threaten the social order, to the point where rulers would raze them. Johnson reconstructs the history of the opera house by bringing together evidence from a variety of disciplines, including music, art, theatre, and politics. Writing in an engaging manner, he sets the history of the opera house within its broader early modern social context.

Building on the long-established success of Ethan Mordden's Opera Anecdotes, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes continues where the original left off, bringing into view the new corps of major singers that arose after the first book's publication in 1985 - artists such as Renee Fleming, Roberto Alagna, Deborah Voigt, Jonas Kaufmann, Kathleen Battle, and Jane Eaglen (who tested her family with Turandot's three riddles and got a very original answer). There are also fresh adventures with opera's fabled great - Rossini, Wagner, Toscanini (whose temper tantrums are always good for a story), Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price (who, when the Met's Rudolf Bing offered her the voice-killing role of Abigaille in Verdi's Nabucco, said, "Man, are you crazy?"). Almost all the stories in The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes are completely new, whether from the present or the past, taking in many historical developments, from the rise of the conductor to the appearance of the gymmed-up "bari-hunk" who refuses to play any role in which he can't appear shirtless. While most of Mordden's anecdotes are humorous, some are emotionally touching, such as one recounting a Met production of Mozart's The Marriage Of Figaro in which Renee Fleming sang alongside her own six-year-old daughter. Other tales are suspenseful, as when Tito Gobbi shows off his ability to make anyone turn around simply by staring at his or her back. He tries it on Nazi monster Joseph Goebbels, who does turn around, and then starts to move toward Gobbi, seething with rage, step by step... Mordden recounts these stories in his own unique voice, amplifying events for reading pleasure and adding in background material so the opera newcomer can play on the same field as the aficionado. Witty, dramatoic, and at times a little shocking, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes will be a welcome addition to any opera fan's library.

Nineteenth-century French grand opera was a musical and cultural phenomenon with an important and widespread transnational presence in Europe. Primary attention in the major studies of the genre has so far been on the Parisian context for which the majority of the works were originally written. In contrast, this volume takes account of a larger geographical and historical context, bringing the Europe-wide impact of the genre into focus. The book presents case studies including analyses of grand opera in small-town Germany and Switzerland; grand operas adapted for Scandinavian capitals, a cockney audience in London, and a court audience in Weimar; and Portuguese and Russian grand operas after the French model. Its overarching aim is to reveal how grand operas were used - performed, transformed, enjoyed and criticised, emulated and parodied - and how they became part of musical, cultural and political life in various European settings. The picture that emerges is complex and diversified, yet it also testifies to the interrelated processes of cultural and political change as bourgeois audiences, at varying paces and with local variations, increased their influence, and as discourses on language, nation and nationalism influenced public debates in powerful ways.

The Yeomen of the Guard is one of the most popular and enduring Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy operas. This critical performing edition, edited by Colin Jagger, Director of Music, University of Portsmouth, marks the 125th anniversary of the opera's first performance. The edition presents the opera as it was originally conceived, correcting errors found in older editions (regarding music, dialogue, and stage directions) and including unpublished songs and alternative endings. The vocal score is clear and practical as well as scholarly and authoritative, reflecting the editor's experience as a conductor. Full scores and clearly printed orchestral parts are available on hire/rental, and are consistent with the vocal score. The full score is also available on sale. In a further break with other editions, the vocal score includes the complete libretto.

Updated and expanded version of the classic reference work, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Opera, this new text edition examines the history and development of opera, from its roots in the theatrical choral dances of Ancient Greece, through the sublime compositions of Handel and Mozart and on to the groundbreaking works of Verdi, Wagner and beyond. Organised by era, the composers and their works, along with the key librettists and singers of the period, are placed in their historical, social and cultural context through extensive introductory sections. Cross-references and theme boxes allow the reader to follow a particular area of interest throughout the book, or to explore related information. The comprehensive text brings to life the splendour and emotional energy of the best operas, performers and companies.

While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European-Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies since the late 1980s, and masculinity has been the focus of recent if sporadic musicological discussion, the relationship between masculinity and opera has so far escaped detailed critical scrutiny. Operating from a position of sympathy with feminist and queer approaches and the phallocentric tendencies they identify, this study offers a unique perspective on the cultural relativism of opera by focusing on the male operatic subject. Anchored by musical analysis or close readings of musical discourse, the contributions take an interdisciplinary approach by also engaging with theatre, popular music, and cultural musicology scholarship. The various musical, theoretical, and socio-political trajectories of the essays are historically dispersed from seventeenth to twentieth- first-century operatic works and practices, visiting masculinity and the operatic voice, the complication or refusal of essentialist notions of masculinity, and the operatic representation of the 'crisis' of masculinity. This volume will not only enliven the study of masculinity in opera, but be an appealing contribution to music scholars interested in gender, history, and new musicology.

Angela Gheorghiu is one of the most passionate and talented artists working in opera today, a larger-than-life figure whose intensity and drive, on stage and off, have commanded the attention of the opera world. This authorized biography of the internationally acclaimed soprano, largely composed of exclusive interviews with the artist, covers Gheorghiu's life and career from her childhood in Communist Romania to her spectacular Covent Garden debut in 1992 and up to the present day. In it, Gheorghiu shares new insights into the performance of many of her iconic stage roles and her collaborations with opera's leading lights. Also featured are commentaries and reminiscences by such celebrated figures in the music and art worlds as Grace Bumbry, Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, Marilyn Horne, Bryn Terfel, and Franco Zeffirelli.

While a stage production can disrupt a work that was thought to be established, David J. Levin here argues that the genre of opera is itself unsettled, and that the performance of operas, at its best, clarifies this condition by bringing opera's restlessness and volatility to life. "Unsettling Opera" explores a variety of fields, considering questions of operatic textuality, dramaturgical practice, and performance theory. Levin opens with a brief history of opera production, opera studies, and dramatic composition, and goes on to consider in detail various productions of the works of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Ultimately, the book seeks to initiate a dialogue between scholars of music, literature, and performance by addressing questions raised in each field in a manner that influences them all.

The Real Traviata is the rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La Dame aux Camelias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans. Her life was painfully short, but by sheer willpower, intelligence, talent, and stunning looks she attained such prominence in the French capital that ministers of the government and even members of the French royal family fell under her spell. In the 1840s she commanded the kind of 'paparazzi' attention that today we associate only with major royalty or the biggest Hollywood stars. Aside from the younger Dumas, her conquests included a host of writers and artists, including the greatest pianist of the century, Franz Liszt, with whom she once hoped to elope. When she died Theophile Gautier, one of the most important Parisian writers of the day, penned an obituary fit for a princess. Indeed, he boldly claimed that she had been a princess, notwithstanding her peasant origin and her distinctly demi-monde existence. And although now largely forgotten, in the years immediately after her death, Marie's legend if anything grew in stature, with her immortalization in Verdi's La traviata, an opera in which the great Romantic composer tried to capture her essence in some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.