Academic attention has focused on America's influence on European stage works, and yet dozens of operettas from Austria and Germany were produced on Broadway and in the West End, and their impact on the musical life of the early twentieth century is undeniable. In this ground breaking book, Derek B. Scott examines the cultural transfer of operetta from the German stage to Britain and the USA and offers a historical and critical survey of these operettas and their music. In the period 1900-1940, over sixty operettas were produced in the West End, and over seventy on Broadway. A study of these stage works is important for the light they shine on a variety of social topics of the period - from modernity and gender relations to new technology and new media - and these are investigated in the individual chapters. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In the early eighteenth century, the benefit performance became an essential component of commercial music-making in Britain. Benefits, adapted from the spoken theatre, provided a new model from which instrumentalists, singers, and composers could reap financial and professional rewards. Benefits could be given as theatre pieces, concerts, or opera performances for the benefit of individual performers; or in aid of specific organizations. The benefit changed Britain's musico-theatrical landscape during this time and these special performances became a prototype for similar types of events in other European and American cities. Indeed, the charity benefit became a musical phenomenon in its own right, leading, for example, to the lasting success of Handel's Messiah. By examining benefits from a musical perspective - including performers, audiences, and institutions - the twelve chapters in this collection present the first study of the various ways in which music became associated with the benefit system in eighteenth-century Britain.

As a legacy of the Habsburg Empire, performances of Jacques Offenbach's musical stage works played an important role in Budapest musico-theatrical life in the twentieth century. However, between the collapse of the Empire and the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, political ideologies strongly influenced the character of these productions, when they took place. Public performances of Offenbach's works were prohibited between 1938 and 1945 and they became the bases for propagandadistic adaptations in the 1950s. This element explores how the local operetta tradition and the vogue of operettas featuring composers as characters during the interwar period were also important factors in how Offenbach's stage works were performed in mid-twentieth century Budapest in versions that sometimes bore little resemblance to the originals.

31 really simple arrangements of operatic masterpieces starting at about the level of Piano Time 2 and arranged in order of difficulty.

Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. "Divas and Scholars" is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett's personal experiences of triumphant--and even failed--performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas.
Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design.
Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrallboth aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it--in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.

A renowned Verdi authority offers here the often-astounding first history of how Verdi's early operas -- including one of his great masterpieces, Rigoletto -- made their way into America's musical life. The operas of Giuseppe Verdi stand at the center of today's operatic repertoire, and have done so for more than a century. The story of how the reputation and wide appeal of these operas spread from Western Europe throughout the world has long needed to be told. This latest book by noted Verdi authority George W. Martin, Verdi in America: Oberto through Rigoletto, specifically details the changing fortunes of Verdi's early operas in the theaters andconcert halls of the United States. Among the important works whose fates Martin traces are Nabucco, Attila, Ernani, Macbeth (in its original version), Luisa Miller, and one of Verdi's immortal masterpieces: Rigoletto, denounced in 1860 as the epitome of immorality. Martin also explores the astonishing revival of many of these operas in the 1940s and onward (including Macbeth in its revised version of 1865), and the first American productions-sometimes in small opera houses outside the main circuit of some Verdi operas that had never previously managed to cross the Atlantic. Extensive quotations from newspaper reviews testify tothe eventual triumph of these remarkable works. They also reveal the crucial shifts in tastes and expectations that have occurred from Verdi's day to our own. Independent scholar George W. Martin is the author of several books on Italian opera, including Verdi, His Music, Life and Times, Verdi at the Golden Gate: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Years, and Aspects of Verdi.

Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany presents opera as a site for the renegotiation of tradition in a politically fraught era of rebuilding. Though the "Zero Hour" put a rhetorical caesura between National Socialism and postwar West Germany, the postwar era was characterized by significant cultural continuity with the past. With nearly all of the major opera houses destroyed and a complex relationship to the competing ethics of modernism and restoration, opera was a richly contested art form, and the genre's reputed conservatism was remarkably multi-faceted. Author Emily Richmond Pollock explores how composers developed different strategies to make new opera "new" while still deferring to historical conventions, all of which carried cultural resonances of their own. Diverse approaches to operatic tradition are exemplified through five case studies in works by Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, Carl Orff, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Werner Egk. Each opera alludes to a distinct cultural or musical past, from Greek tragedy to Dada, bel canto to Berg. Pollock's discussions of these pieces draw on source studies, close readings, unpublished correspondence, institutional history, and critical commentary to illuminate the politicized artistic environment that influenced these operas' creation and reception. The result is new insight into how the particular opposition between a conservative genre and the idea of the "Zero Hour" motivated the development of opera's social, aesthetic, and political value after World War II.

PETER PEARS's reputation as an outstanding and distinctive tenor is grounded in his interpretations of Benjamin Britten's works; their partnership of thirty years significantly shaped and defined musical developments not only in England but on a broader plane. Throughout their busy professional lives they travelled extensively, on concert tours and on holiday, finding fresh stimulus in change. Pear's twelve travel diaries, brought together in this volume, record much of that travel and provide valuable contextual material on the musical development of both Pears and Britten.

The first diary dates from 1936, the year before his friendship with Britten began, when he went on tour to North America with the New English Singers. Other diaries record the five-month tour to the Far East and the important encounters (especially for Britten) with the gamelan music of Bali and the Japanese Noh theatre; visits to Russia as guests of Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, where they met significant figures from Russian musical life; and attendance at the Ansbach Bach Festival when Pears was at the height of his career. Also recorded are holidays in the Caribbean and Italy, a concert tour through the north of England, and accounts of the rehearsals and performances of the New York premieres of Billy Budd and Death in Venice.

This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianita) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.

Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly $5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Rosselli also examines the sexist prejudices against the castrati of the eighteenth century and against women singers. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdote, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.

Emslie's study of Wagner's creativity examines the centrality of love - and its obverse, hate - to the composer's world view. Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love is a bold book which argues that Wagner's music dramas cannot be understood if treated separately from his essays, his life, the intellectual and artistic climate of his day, and the broader history of Germany. Wagner attempts a range of reconciliations that are radical in content and form and appear to succeed partly because he is in well-nigh complete command of the aesthetic product; not only text and music, but also production practice. Nonetheless, all the reconciliations ultimately break down, but in a manner that is illuminating. This is not a celebration of the seamless work of art, but a radical unpicking of the seemingly seamless. 'Love' is the central organising concept of the whole Wagnerian project. Love - sexual and spiritual, egotistical and charitable, love of the individual and of the race - is the key Wagnerian driving force. And therefore so is hate. Of course Wagner cannot employ love without its opposite, and it is critically significant that his anti-semitism is based upon his view that the Jews are 'loveless'. The book handles Wagner's anti-semitism (andthe ongoing row about it) in a unique way, in that it is shown to be aesthetically and intellectually productive (for him!). This leads to a radical reinterpretation of Wagner's music dramas. BARRY EMSLIE is an independent scholar who lives and teaches in Berlin.

Wagner is one of the most controversial of composers, and much that has been written about him--including his autobiography--is misleading. Barry Millington draws on the best previous scholarship and his own original research to set the record straight. The first part of this book is devoted to biography; the second, to a detailed study of the operas. Millington offers a historical review of the critical interpretation of each opera, including a discussion of recent methods of formal analysis. In this revised edition, two chapters, those on Tannhauser and Die Meistersinger, include significant new material. The bibliography has also been updated.

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These cliches are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

Volume IX completes The New Oxford History of Music in 10 volumes, and includes the whole span of western instrumental music and opera in the greater part of the nineteenth century.

Although it takes little more than an hour to perform, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England. This book demonstrates the opera's deep roots in the theatrical and musical traditions of its day, summarizing the cultural climate in which the opera was composed and analyzing Nahum Tate's libretto in light of seventeenth-century English music text conventions. Harris also evaluates the surviving sources, comparing them with the original libretto, and discusses the work's performance history and critical reception from the first performance through the revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play.

One of the Broadway musicals that can genuinely claim to have transformed the genre, West Side Story has been featured in many books on Broadway, but it has yet to be the focus of a scholarly monograph. Nigel Simeone begins by exploring the long process of creating West Side Story, including a discussion of Bernstein's sketches, early drafts of the score and script, as well as cut songs. The core of the book is a commentary on the music itself. West Side Story is one of the very few Broadway musicals for which there is a complete published orchestral score, as well as two different editions of the piano-vocal score. The survival of the original copied orchestral score, and the reminiscences of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, reveal details of the orchestration process, and the extent to which Bernstein was involved in this. Simeone's commentary considers: musical characteristics and compositional techniques used to mirror the drama (for example, the various uses of the tritone), motivic development, the use and reinvention of Broadway and other conventions, the creation of dramatic continuity in the score through the use of motifs and other devices, the unusual degree of dissonance and rhythmic complexity (at least for the time), and the integration of Latin-American dance forms (Mambo, Huapango and so on). Simeone also considers the reception of West Side Story in the contemporary press. The stir the show caused included the response that it was the angular, edgy score that made it a remarkable achievement. Not all reviews were uncritical. Finally, the book looks in detail at the making of the original Broadway cast recording, made in just one day, included on the accompanying downloadable resources.

Experience the passion and drama of the world's greatest operas with this sumptuously illustrated visual guide. Immerse yourself in more than 400 years of the world's most celebrated operas and discover the fascinating stories behind them. Explore the lives of singers such as Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, and Jonas Kaufmann. Meet composers like Mozart, Wagner, and Britten, and the librettists with whom they collaborated to create the magical blend of words and music that make up opera. From its origins in the 17th-century courts of Italy to live screenings in public spaces today, Opera: The Definitive Illustrated Story follows the history of opera from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607, to Cosi fan Tutte, La Boheme, and modern operas such as Brokeback Mountain. It explains musical terminology, traces historical developments, and sets everything in cultural context. This awe-inspiring opera book further features: -Includes all of the most important operas from the Renaissance to the 21st century -Profiles the key composers, librettists, performers, and companies, with details of their lives, works, and influence -Arranged in chronological order to show the evolution of the genre -Clear, informative explanation of musical terminology and different types of opera Filled with photographs of all the key figures and performances, this book revels in the sets and costumes that make up the grand spectacle of opera. It also explores the great opera houses of the world, such as La Scala, Milan, the Met in New York, and the Sydney Opera House. Opera: The Definitive Illustrated Story is the essential book for anyone who wants to understand and enjoy the constantly evolving world of this beloved art form. Did you know that there are more than 25,000 opera performances per year worldwide? Opera: The Definitive Illustrated Story can be regarded as the most lavishly illustrated history of opera currently available, covering all of the most important operas from the Renaissance to the 21st century, and is completely global in scope. A must-have volume for opera buffs, whether as a gift or self-purchase, if you're a music lover looking for an accessible introduction to opera, then this is the book for you!

Le nozze di Figaro is one of Mozart's best-loved and most enduring works. The first of the three operas he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte and based on Beaumarchais's play, it established the thirty-year-old Mozart as an opera composer of the very first rank. Its combination of wit, acute psychological observation and sublime music has enthralled audiences ever since its premiere in Prague in 1786. This guide contains articles about the historical background to the opera, as well as musical and dramatic commentaries. Further articles deal with the changes in musical performance brought about in recent times by the period practice movement and with the particular uses Mozart makes of recitatives. There is also a survey of the opera's most important productions. Illustrations, a thematic guide, the full libretto with English translation and reference sections are also included.

An opera with instrumental parts for strings, keyboard continuo, plus optional guitar for dances
This edition, with English and German texts, is based on that by Edward Dent (first published in 1925), but includes more recent scholarship. The preface presents a history of the work. The score is both scholarly and practical for performers.

Prokofiev considered himself to be primarily a composer of opera, and his return to Russia in the mid-1930s was partially motivated by the goal to renew his activity in this genre. His Soviet career coincided with the height of the Stalin era, when official interest and involvement in opera increased, leading to demands for nationalism and heroism to be represented on the stage to promote the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regime. Drawing on a wealth of primary source materials and engaging with recent scholarship in Slavonic studies, this book investigates encounters between Prokofiev's late operas and the aesthetics of socialist realism, contemporary culture (including literature, film, and theatre), political ideology, and the obstacles of bureaucratic interventions and historical events. This contextual approach is interwoven with critical interpretations of the operas in their original versions, providing a new account of their stylistic and formal features and connections to operatic traditions.