Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and 'new' interacted in subtle and often surprising ways. There is still much to document, explore and explain in terms of composers and repertories and their multi-layered contexts. This collection of essays by European, British and American musicologists seeks to consolidate the recent growth interest in seventeenth century studies. It includes discussions of leading composers (d'India, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Steffani, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Handel), repertories (chamber laments, staged balli and operatic mad-scenes), geographical issues (the arrival of Neapolitan opera in Venice), institutional contexts, and iconography. Inspiration for the book was drawn from the poineering research of Nigel Fortune, to whom the volume is dedicated on his 70th birthday.

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.

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.

Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouveres from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality-as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils-Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book-to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was Benjamin Britten's seventh major opera and had its premiere at Aldeburgh in 1960. Britten and his partner Peter Pears prepared a condensed version of Shakespeare's much-loved comedy for the libretto, using (with the exception of a single line) only the original text. In this newly commissioned guide, Andrew Plant explores the genesis of the opera's composition, including passages of recently published material from Britten's own correspondence. Philip Reed examines the musical language of the opera and has prepared a detailed thematic guide, while David Nice outlines many of the different approaches to the work in productions that have taken place over the last forty years. An essay by Philip Brett discusses how the opera reflects the central issues in Britten's work. Finally, a unique article is included which Britten himself wrote for the Observer immediately preceding the work's premiere. The present edition also contains twentyfive black-and-white and colour photographs, the full libretto, a discography, DVD guide, bibliography and website guide. It will prove an invaluable companion to opera-goers wanting to increase their understanding and enjoyment of this magical work.

Giuseppe Verdi hat mit seiner Oper "Nabucco" 1842 den Durchbruch zu seinem Welterfolg geschaffen. Wie ist dies in seiner Zeit einzuordnen? Ist sie die musikalische und politische Grundlage des Risorgimento - Judaer kampfen um ihre Freiheit wie jetzt die Italiener - oder wurde sie spater dazu stilisiert? In der Gestalt des Nabucco vereinen sich die drei altorientalischen Herrscher Nebukadnezar II, Nabonid und Kyros II.

Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was twenty-four years old, and the opera was described by Albert Einstein as 'one of those works that even a genius like Mozart could write only once in his life'. It is one of most astonishing achievements of an altogether astonishing career. In this newly commissioned guide, Julian Rushton explains the special nature of the music in a detailed analysis of its themes and development, while Nicholas Till places the opera in its context as an expression of the Enlightenment. Gary Kahn explores the performance history of an opera which, although largely ignored for over a hundred and fifty years, has now taken its place as part of the international operatic repertoire. A selection of the unique letters between Mozart and his father written during the opera's composition is also included.

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.

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.

The stage works of Saint-Saens range from grand open-air pageants to one-act comic operas, and include the first composed film score. Yet, with the exception of Samson et Dalila, his twelve operas have lain in the shadows since the composer's death in 1921. Widely performed in his lifetime, they vanished from the repertory - never played, never recorded - until now. With four twenty-first-century revivals as a backdrop, this timely book is the first study of Saint-Saens's operas, demonstrating the presence of the same breadth and versatility as in his better known works. Hugh Macdonald's wide knowledge of French music in the nineteenth century gives a powerful understanding of the different conventions and expectations that governed French opera at the time. The interaction of Saint-Saens with his contemporaries is a colourful and important part of the story.

Standard Italian libretto, with complete English translation. Convenient and thoroughly portable-an ideal companion for reading along with a recording or the performance itself. Introduction. List of Characters. Plot Summary.

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.

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.

Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound and often surprising intersections between the sciences and opera during the long nineteenth century are here explored for the first time. These touch on a wide variety of topics, including vocal physiology, theories of listening and sensory communication, technologies of theatrical machinery and discourses of biological degeneration. Taken together, the chapters reveal an intertwined cultural history that extends from backstage hydraulics to drawing-room hypnotism, and from laryngoscopy to theatrical aeronautics. Situated at the intersection of opera studies and the history of science, the book therefore offers a novel and illuminating set of case studies, of a kind that will appeal to historians of both science and opera, and of European culture more generally from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian period.

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.

In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as "pasticcios" since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles.

The first book to use subversive sexuality as a lens through which to provocatively view opera in the 21st century. Imagine Armida, Handel's Saracen sorceress, performing her breakneck coloraturas in a black figure-hugging rubber dress, beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane, suspending a captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her dungeon. Mozart's peasant girl Zerlina, meanwhile, is tying up and blindfolding her fiance to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don Giovanni. And how about Wagner's wizard, Klingsor, ensnaring his choir of flower maidens in elaborate Japanese rope bondage? Opera, it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas-from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and beyond-in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately, Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.

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.

The Black Dog Opera Library is the best, easiest and most informative and budget-friendly way to enjoy four of the greatest operas of all time.

Finally available again, and packaged with gorgeous new covers, each book in the library includes the complete opera on 2 CDs, featuring world-class performances and orchestras; the complete libretto, plus its English translation; an exciting history of the opera; a biography of the composer; a synopsis of the story, broken down by act and scene; and dozens of photographs and drawings depicting performances, singers, sets, costumes, and more.

Carmen features Grace Bumbry, Jon Vickers, Mirella Freni, and Kostas Paskalis, with Rafael Fru beck de Burgos conducting the Orchestra of the Theatre National de l'Opera.

Also available:

La Boheme featuring Nicolai Gedda and Mirella Freni, with Thomas Schippers conducting the Orchestro e Coro del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma; La Traviata featuring Beverly Sills, Nicolai Gedda, and Rolando Panerai, with Aldo Ceccato conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; The Marriage of Figaro featuring Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Heather Harper, Judith Blegen, Geraint Evans, Teresa Berganza, and Birgit Finnila, with Daniel Barenboim conducting the English Chamber Orchestra.

Listen. Enjoy. Learn."

Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you."Opera 101" is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover--a clear, friendly, and truly complete handbook to learning how to listen to opera, whether on the radio, on recordings, or live at the opera house. Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher about opera who for many years was performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces the reader (whatever his or her level of musical knowledge) to all the elements that make up opera, including: A brief, entertaining history of opera;An explanation of key operatic concepts, from vocal types to musical conventions;Hints on the best way to approach the first opera you attend and how to best understand what is happening both offstage and on;Lists of recommended books and recordings, and the most complete traveler's guide to opera houses around the world. The major part of "Opera 101" is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute analysis of eleven key operas, ranging from Verdi's thunderous masterpiece "Rigoletto" and Puccini's electrifying "Tosca" through works by Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, to the psychological complexities of Richard Strauss's "Elektra." Once you have completed "Opera 101," you will be prepared to see and hear any opera you encounter, thanks to this book's unprecedentedly detailed and enjoyable method of revealing the riches of opera.

Das Buch behandelt literarische Texte, die zur Vertonung fur musikalischen Vortrag bestimmt waren. Der erste Hauptteil handelt vom deutschen Singspiel des 18. Jahrhunderts, vor allem in seiner oesterreichisch-suddeutschen, speziell Wiener, Auspragung. Das Singspiel wahlte hoefische und burgerliche Sujets, aber auch Marchenstoffe, und war fur ausgebildete Sanger gedacht. Seinen Hoehepunkt fand es in der gemeinsamen Arbeit von Emanuel Schikaneder und Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart an der "Zauberfloete" und in Goethes "Zweiter Zauberfloete". Der zweite Hauptteil behandelt die Operndichtungen, die der Wiener Hugo von Hofmannsthal fur den Komponisten Richard Strauss schrieb, besonders die symboltrachtige, vielfach an die "Zauberfloete" anknupfende Oper "Die Frau ohne Schatten" und "Arabella", das letzte gemeinsame Werk beider Kunstler.

This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.