From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings. Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

The man whom W. H. Auden called `perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived' has inspired both greater adulation and greater loathing than any other composer. In this penetrating analysis, Bryan Magee outlines the range and depth of Wagner's achievement, and shows how his complex and often erotic music expresses the repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche. He also examines Wagner's detailed stage directions, and the prose works in which he formulated his ideas, and sheds interesting new light on his anti-semitism.

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas cultural, social, and personal associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

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.

The plays of Shakespeare inspired Verdi's deepest resources. "Macbeth" (1847) was one of the composer's earliest operatic-dramatic triumphs and "Otello" (1887) was among his latest. At the end of his life Verdi astonished a public accustomed to his tragic fervor with "Falstaff, " a gem of pure comedy.
Verdi's last great work premiered in the composer's 80th year. This reproduction of the complete and unabridged score brings the final proof of the maestro's universality to the many students, musicians, and opera lovers who would see for themselves the summation of Verdi's brilliant orchestral and compositional powers. Ricordi was Verdi's original publisher; this reprint of his edition contains the standard, definitive score and includes English translations of the original front matter. "Falstaff" benefits from Verdi's understanding of Wagner and other operatic innovators. Nevertheless, between its concise but forceful orchestration and its copious melodic invention, it remains singularly Verdian. Its wit astonishes as much today as it did in 1893.

Benjamin Britten was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. He wrote a feast of music from an early age, first achieving international fame in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes; now more operas by Britten are performed worldwide than by any other composer born in the twentieth century. In this incisive guide, John Bridcut discusses Britten's music and explores his musical influences, his complex personality, his emotional and professional relationships, and the fascinating nooks and crannies of his daily life, normally overlooked. An indispensable source of fresh insights into this towering figure in British music, this is an updated edition of the Faber Pocket Guide to Britten, including the full text of Britten's speech On Receiving the First Aspen Award.

'La Traviata' was Giuseppe Verdi's eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from 'La Dame aux Camelias' by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valery and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its inevitable tragic outcome. It had its premiere at La Fenice in Venice in 1853 and has gone on to become one of the most performed and greatly loved of all operas. There are articles in the guide about Verdi's preparations for the first performances, a musical commentary, an overview of the opera's social background and an examination of how the libretto was adapted from Dumas's play. Also included are a survey of important performances and performers, sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, the full libretto and English translation, a discography, bibliography and DVD and website guides.

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.

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered one of the most typically French as well as one of the most successful of the opera composers of the 19th century. Although musically gifted, he initially chose commerce as a career, but soon realized that his future lay in music. He studied under Cherubini, and it was not long before his opera-comique La Bergere Chateleine (1820), written at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. Perhaps the greatest turning point in Auber's life was his meeting with the librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), with whom he developed a long and illustrious working partnership that only ended with Scribe's death. Success followed success; works such as Le Macon (1825) and La Muette de Portici (1828) brought Auber public fame and official recognition. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in 1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur.Auber seems to have been fated to live in revolutionary times; during his long life no less than four revolutions took place in France (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870). Auber's famous historical grand opera La Muette de Portici (also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) is perhaps unsurprisingly based on revolution, depicting the 1647 Neapolitan uprising against Spanish rule. It is a key work in operatic history, and has a revolutionary history itself: it was a performance of this work in Brussels in 1830 that helped spark the revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. It was a revolution that hastened Auber's death at the old age of 89. He died on 12 May 1871 as a result of a long illness aggravated by the privations and dangers of the Siege of Paris. He had refused to leave the city he had always loved, even after his house had been set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. In a twist of fate, a mark had been placed on the house of the composer of Masaniello, the very voice of Romantic liberty!Auber's overtures were once instantly recognizable, favourites of the light Classical repertoire. His gracious melodies and dance rhythms had a huge influence, both on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany. Musical tastes and fashions have changed, and contemporary audiences are more accustomed to the heavier fare of verismo, Wagnerian transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism. The operas themselves, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), are seldom performed, yet Auber's elegant, delicate and restrained art remains as appealing to the discerning listener as ever it was.Zerline, an opera in three acts with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first performed at the Academie nationale de musique (Salle de la rue Le Peletier) on 16 May 1851. The scene is set in Palermo, during the Restoration. The Prince of Roccanera, married to the sister of the King, has a supposed niece, Gemma. She is really his daughter by Zerline, an orange-seller. The latter was abducted by pirates, and having returned to Palermo after many trials, now meets her daughter, assuming the role of her aunt. She learns that Gemma loves a young naval officer, Rodolphe, but that the Prince's wife wishes Gemma to marry the King's cousin, much against the girl's wishes. In the third act, Zerline, already alerted to an intrigue compromising to the two young lovers, is able to safeguard their integrity and bring about their union.The action is better suited to a vaudeville than an opera, and the scenario has little innate interest. The role of Zerline was devised especially for the great contralto Marietta Alboni (1823-94), the first role she created. The B-flat major overture immediately establishes the family nature of the drama, with its parable of past sins, social disparity and all-conquering maternal love.There is allusion to the Sicilian setting in the two opening choruses of act 1 which are dominated by barcarolle rhythms in establishing the couleur locale. Alboni's magnificent talent added great value to the light music written by Auber for this slight canvas. The work consequently contains many pieces of a purely virtuoso nature. Among them are the grand air d'entree "O Palerme! o Sicile!", the thematically central canzonetta "Achetez mes belles oranges", and the duet for soprano and contralto "Quel trouble en mon ame" in act 1. It is as though the Italian setting of the story and the Italian origins of the prima donna caused Auber to look to his early love for Rossini, and his enduring attachment to Italian musical forms and local colour (as in Fiorella, La Muette de Portici, Fra Diavolo, Acteon, La Sirene, Zanetta and Haydee).The vocal part of Zerline is a conscious re-creation of the old Rossini mode, and her various solos are written in the style of the virtuoso contralto of the opera seria, obviously with a contemporary Gallic fleetness all Auber's own. The Grand Air demonstrates all the features.The original cast was: Merly (Roccanera); Mlle Marietta Alboni (Zerline); Mlle Maria-Dolores-Benedicta-Josephine Nau (Gemma); Aimes (Rodolphe); Mlle Dameron (the Princess of Roccanera); and Lyons (the Marquis of Bettura). The work was only performed 14 times in Paris, with no reprise. It was translated into Italian, and produced in Brussels (in French) and London (in Italian).