for SSA and piano This jubilant and uplifting carol is sure to become a Christmas classic. The memorable melodies have a fittingly dance-like quality, and the bell-like piano part adds festive sparkle, while providing a resolute rhythmic grounding. Coupling the familiar Christmas words with lesser-known verses of the traditional carol depicting Jesus in the wilderness and the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, this piece is suitable for concerts and services throughout the year.

In this book, Steven LaRue examines the influence of the great operatic singers on Handel's creative process. In Handel's day the idea of a singer creating a role was perhaps never more true, and the author demonstrates not only the singer's important role in Handel's opera composition, but also the effect that opera singers had on the creation of opera throughout the eighteenth century.

An exploration of avant-garde music and operatic form in Weimar Germany Weimar Germany -- the age of Bauhaus and Brecht -- was a time of significant activity in all areas of the artistic avant-garde. Musicologist Susan Cook explores this intriguing period in a look at Zeitoper (topical opera)and its primary exponents, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Zeitoper has proved to be of importance as an experimental form that broadened the definition of modern opera and musical theatre, incorporating elements previously thought unsuitable. Celebrating modern life in its libretti, its scores borrowed heavily from American dance music and jazz. Opera for a New Republic is the first book to provide a broad historical,cultural and artistic context for the development of this operatic genre. Through it we learn that Zeitoper, although short-lived, has proved to be a vital component in the development of twentieth-century operatic style. Susan Cook is Professor of Musicology at the University of Wisconsin.

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of 'musicality' in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The legendary Eoan group has performed opera, ballet and drama since the 1930s. The group was the first amateur company in South Africa to perform dance, theatre and grand opera often to packed houses in Cape Town’s best concert halls. During their artistic peak, from the 1950s to the 1970s, Eoan was extremely popular amongst opera lovers, but because of South Africa’s racial policies, could not perform with white opera and ballet companies and had to suffer the many indignities of segregation. Nonetheless, Eoan remains a vital part not only of the performance history of classical music and opera in South Africa, but also of the rich cultural heritage of District Six in Cape Town. Through extensive interviews with former Eoan members, and rich visual and archival material (from the archive now housed in the Documentation Centre for Music at Stellenbosch University), this book, the first on the history of the group, makes a unique contribution to South African music history. It illustrates not only how difficult it was for many people to work in the classical arts during the apartheid years, but also how music and the arts can bring meaning to the lives of communities and individuals. The publication of Eoan – Our story is made possible through generous funds provided by Stellenbosch University, The Nussbaum Foundation and the LW Hiemstra Trust, established by Riekie Hiemstra in remembrance of Ludwig Wybren (Louis) Hiemstra.

The art of bel canto, or 'beautiful singing,' is perhaps the most referenced and yet the most enigmatic and elusive style in the repertoire of the classically trained singer. During the bel canto era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers routinely left the final shaping of recitatives, arias, and songs to performers. Vocalists in turn treated scores as a starting point for interpretation and personalized the music as their own, rather than merely giving voice to the score as written, transforming otherwise inexpressively notated music into passionate declamation. In other words, singers saw their role more as one of re-creation than of simple interpretation. Familiarity with the range of strategies prominent vocalists of the past employed to unlock the eloquent expression hidden in scores enables modern singers to take a similar re-creative approach to enhancing the texts before them. In this first ever guide to the bel canto style, author Robert Toft provides singers with the tools they need to bring scores to life in an historically informed manner. Replete with illustrations based on excerpts from Italianate recitatives and arias by composers ranging from Handel to Mozart, each chapter offers a theoretical discussion of one fundamental aspect of bel canto, followed by a practical application of the principals involved. Drawing on a wealth of documents surviving the era, including treatises, scores, newspaper reviews, and letters, this book reflects the breadth of practices utilized by singers of the bel canto era, affording modern day vocalists the opportunity to not only how singers altered and embellished the texts before them, but also to develop their own personal style of doing so. Complete with six complete aria scores for performers to personalize through bel canto techniques, and a companion website offering demonstrations of the principles explained, Bel Canto is an essential resource to any singer or vocal instructor looking to explore and master this repertoire.

Modernist Mysteries: Persephone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Persephone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, Andre Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s.
As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future."

The pathbreaking revival in Paris ca. 1900 of long-neglected operas by Mozart, Gluck, and Rameau -- and what this meant to French audiences, critics, and composers. Focusing on the operas of Mozart, Gluck, and Rameau, Building the Operatic Museum examines the role that eighteenth-century works played in the opera houses of Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. These works, mostly neglected during the nineteenth century, became the main exhibits in what William Gibbons calls the Operatic Museum -- a physical and conceptual space in which great masterworks from the past and present could, like works ofvisual art in the Louvre, entertain audiences while educating them in their own history and national identity. Drawing on the fields of musicology, museum studies, art history, and literature, Gibbons explores how this "museum" transformed Parisian musical theater into a place of cultural memory, dedicated to the display of French musical greatness. William Gibbons is Associate Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University.

Investigation of unjustly neglected opera. Hans Pfitzner's `musical legend' Palestrina is considered in the German-speaking countries to be one of the supreme masterpieces of music, and yet it is all but unknown elsewhere. The opera, first performed in 1917, tells the story of the composer Palestrina, his struggle to compose following the death of his wife and in the face of anti-musical decrees from the Church, and his eventual composition of the Missa Papae Marcelli, which, it is said, wasdictated to him by angles and reconciled the Church to contrapuntal music. The story, set against the historical background of the Council of Trent, is an allegory of the individual artist in society, as well as a statement of Pfitzner's own beliefs about the musical climate of his time. Toller discusses the music and the dramatic structure, and presents a comprehensive introduction to the background material in the many diverse fields encompassed by the opera. OWEN TOLLER is Head of Mathematics at Merchant Taylor's School; he is a member of the London Symphony Chorus and sings with a number of other groups. His interest in Pfitzner began when he sang in the first British performance of Palestrina, a semi-professional production by Abbey Opera in London in 1979.

Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports. Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play. Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine. Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'. As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.

In this valuable collection of essays, published to coincide with the tercentenary of Handel's birth, Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition, focusing on the Italian school, to which they are so crucially indebted. Handel's immediate heritage included the figures of Scarlatti, Gasparini and Vivaldi; this book establishes that context, concentrating on contemporary operatic practice, and proceeds to analyse three of Handel's best-known works. It shows how they elaborate and develop the style and method of the Italian operatic theatre, embracing previous traditions and synthesizing them with a new and exciting accentuation.

"The subject cannot fail!" exulted Verdi, when recommending Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse to his librettist. But the censors made every effort to stop it, and the baritone was not easily convinced that a hunchback role would suit him. Jonathan Keates gives a vivid insight into the composition of a masterpiece. Verdi long afterwards thought it his best work, and Roger Parker explains why. Peter Nichols, author of several bestselling books in Italy, picks out some of the peculiarly Italian attitudes and characters in the opera which make it timeless - and incredibly modern.

When first published in 1947, "A Short History of Opera" immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have.

The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day.

"A Short History of Opera" examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included.

With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, "A Short History of Opera" is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.

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.

Two systems of timekeeping were in concurrent use in Venice between 1582 and 1797. Government documents conformed to the Venetian year (beginning 1 March), church documents to the papal year (from 1 January). "Song and Season" defines the many ways in which time was discussed, resolving a long-standing fuzziness imposed on studies of personnel, institutions, and cultural dynamics by dating conflicts. It is in this context that the standardization of timekeeping coincided with the collapse of the "dramma per musica" and the rise of scripted comedy and the "opera buffa," Selfridge-Field discloses fascinating relationships between the musical stage and the cultures it served, such as the residues of medieval liturgical feasts embedded in the theatrical year. Such associations were transmuted into lingering seasonal associations with specific dramatic genres. Interactions between culture and chronology thus operated on both general and specific levels. Both are fundamental to understanding theatrical dynamics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

This controversial analysis of Britten's operatic works demonstrates how he used music to explore his most private concerns. Claire Seymour examines ways in which Britten's operas explored and articulated the inherent ambiguity and latent sexuality of music, particularly song, and suggests that they may illustrate his search for a public "voice" which would embody, communicate, and perhaps resolve his private beliefs and anxieties. She demonstrates how the delicate balance between private and public communication, and the tension between art as self-expression and art as moral resolution were key concerns in Britten's music. Analyses of Britten's operas from Paul Bunyan to Death in Venice, the three Church Parables, and several of the "children's operas" offer evidence that, for Britten, opera was the natural medium through which to explore, express and, paradoxically, repress his private concerns.

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world--from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism--one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the "felt" experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world--a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism--and to remind us of art's fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston's Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers's belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

for upper voices and piano or orchestra These three choruses are extracted from the anthology Opera Choruses and each run about 3 minutes long. Orchestral material is available on hire.

This comprehensive and captivating book follows the evolution of Milan's Ricordi archive, from its founding in 1808 by publisher Giovanni Ricordi to its present-day holdings of thousands of scores, letters, libretti, sketches of opera scenery and costume design, photographs, and Art Nouveau and Art Deco posters. In addition, the original manuscripts of nearly all of the operas written by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Paganini are preserved inside its hallowed vaults. The book contains an overview of the archive's entire collection whilst also examining rare autographs, the often-unacknowledged significance of the libretto, and the phenomenon of Italian opera and its important contributions to the world of music and culture. Revealing fascinating stories of uncovered secrets and biographical insights into the composers this book is a treasure trove of musical ephemera which pays tribute to the glorious, dynamic, and colorful history of making, presenting, promoting, and preserving music for the ages.

Richard Strauss in Context offers a distinctive approach to the study of a composer in that it places the emphasis on contextualizing topics rather than on biography and artistic output. One might say that it inverts the relationship between composer and context. Rather than studies of Strauss's librettists that discuss the texts themselves and his musical settings, for instance, this book offers essays on the writers themselves: their biographical circumstances, styles, landmark works, and broader positions in literary history. Likewise, Strauss's contributions to the concert hall are positioned within the broader development of the orchestra and trends in programmatic music. In short, readers will benefit from an elaboration of material that is either absent from or treated only briefly in existing publications. Through this supplemental and broader contextual approach, this book serves as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

Few people these days would question Mozart's rating as the most popular of all classical composers. Yet there exists no substantial, up-to-date English-language study of the man and his works. In this new study of Mozart's early years, Stanley Sadie aims to fill this gap in the form of a traditional biography on a straightforward chronological basis. The volume covers the period up to 1781, the year of Idomeneo and Mozart's settling in Vienna. Individual works are discussed in sequence and related to the events of his life. Stanley Sadie draws substantially on the family correspondence, quoting the letters and discussing what they tell us about Mozart and his world and his relationships with his family and his professional colleagues. Also included is a discussion of all aspects of Mozart's life and his music, relating them to the environment in which he worked, social, economic and cultural as well as musical. Much new material connected with Mozart has come to light in recent years. There have been discoveries of musical sources and new ways of studying known ones. Such finds and methods have changed our view of the chronology of many works and they often have significant biographical ramifications. Understanding of the context for Mozart's music, and indeed his life, has broadened immensely. Stanley Sadie's biography digests and interprets this corpus of new information.

Incorporating a decade of musicological research, the Dictionary is unsurpassed in its scope and quality, with contributions from over 1,300 of the world's leading critics and scholars. A remarkable 11,000 articles, all fully cross-referenced, create a work that has become established as the essential opera reference. Indeed, every aspect of this varied art form is covered: composers, conductors, directors, performers, librettists, literary sources, cities and countries, operatic historians, and opera genres and terminology. BLOver 1800 operas are discussed from the late 16th century Florentine Camerata, through the great 18th and 19th century operas, to contemporary works such as the minimalist theatre pieces of Philip Glass BLThe lives and careers of over 2900 composers are discussed in depth, with entries containing critical assessments as well as discussion of their individual careers and major achievements BLProfiles of every singer who has made a significant contribution to opera are included, from Francesco Rasi in the 1600s to Luciano Pavarotti in the 1990s BLTwo unrivaled indices of character names and arias make it the most useful and user-friendly opera dictionary available BLIllustrated throughout with rare photographs, reproductions of original posters, set and costume designs, and scenes from recent performances