Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

The first study to explore the crucial influence of Kurt Weill on operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein. Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill could not be repeated. Yet Weill's stage works set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Schmid explores how Weill's formal innovations in particular laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, although both composers resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. Comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveals that the principles of Weill's opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre. Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence focuses on works that represent different phases of Weill's mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play Lady in the Dark and the Broadway Opera Street Scene. Blitzstein and Bernstein in turn defied formal boundaries with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, and West Side Story - part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill's German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein's translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein's baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, deepens the connection of Bernstein's aesthetic to Weill.

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 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.

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be studied in the abstract rather than as something to be performed in a specific time and place. Staging "Euridice" explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti. By also taking into account what the singers and instrumentalists did, what the audience saw and heard, and how things changed from creation through rehearsals to performance, this book brings new aspects of Euridice to light in startling ways.

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 first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clement's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.

'Sometimes I liken the creative act to that of being a good gardener. The musical material itself, the harmonies, rhythms, the timbres and tempi, are seeds you have planted. Composing, bringing forth the final formal arrangement of these elements, is often a business of watching them grow, knowing when to nourish and water them and when to prune and weed.' A book unlike anything ever written by a composer, part memoir and part description of the creative process, Hallelujah Junction is an absorbing journey through the musical landscape of John Adams, one of today's most admired and frequently performed composers. A musician of enormous range and technical command, Adams has built a huge audience worldwide through the immediacy and sincerity of his music, such as his Pulitzer prize-winning memorial for the September 11 attack On The Transmigration of Souls. Hallelujah Junction isn't so much an autobiography as a fascinating journey through the musical landscape of his life and times, centred around the three highly controversial operas based on social and political issues he has written in the past twenty-five years - Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and, most recently, Dr Atomic.

(Vocal Collection). For well over a century, the G. Schirmer edition of 24 Italian Songs & Arias of the 17th and 18th Centuries has introduced millions of beginning singers to serious Italian vocal literature. Offered in two accessible keys suitable for all singers, it is likely to be the first publication a voice teacher will ask a first-time student to purchase. The classic Parisotti realizations result in rich, satisfying accompaniments which allow singers pure musical enjoyment. For ease of practice, carefully prepared accompaniments are also available that were recorded by John Keene, a New York-based concert accompanist and vocal coach who has performed throughout the United States for radio and television. Educated at the University of Southern California, Keene has taught accompanying at the university level and collaborated with Gian Carlo Menotti and Thea Musgrave on productions of their operas.

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.

The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has flourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social, and political context has vastly increased. This volume explores opera and operatic life of the years 1750-1800 through a selection of articles intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Richard Strauss's fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941, make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on texts by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss's compositions.

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

Verdi's enduring presence on the opera stages of the world and as a subject for study by scholars in various disciplines has placed him as a central figure within modern culture. His operas, including La traviata, Rigoletto and Aida, are among the most frequently performed worldwide and his popularity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day is undisputed. The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia covers all aspects of Verdi's life, his music and his world. Appendices list Verdi's known works, both published and unpublished, the characters in his operas and the singers who created them, and a chronology of his life. As a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts associated with Verdi, the Encyclopedia reflects the very latest scholarship, presented by an international array of experts and will have a broad appeal for opera lovers, students and scholars.

New essays demonstrating and exploring the abiding fascination of Wagner's controversial work. Richard Wagner's Parsifal remains an inexhaustible yet highly controversial work. This "stage consecration festival play," as the composer described it, represents the culmination of his efforts to bring medieval myth and modern music together in a dynamic relationship. Wagner's engagement with religion--Buddhist as well as Christian--reaches a climax here, as he seeks through artistic means "to rescue the essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols . . . according to their figurative value, enabling us to see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation." The contributors to this collection break fresh ground in exploring the text, the music, andthe reception history of Parsifal. Wagner's borrowings-and departures-from the medieval sources of the Grail legend, Wolfram's Parzival and Chretien's Perceval, are considered in detail, and the tensional relation of the work to Christianity is probed. New perspectives emerge that bear on the long genesis of the text and music, its affinities to Wagner's earlier works, particularly Tristan und Isolde, and the precise way in which the music was composed. Essays address the work's bold, modernistic musical language and its unprecedented soundscape involving hidden choruses and other unseen sources of sound. The turbulent, astonishing, and sometimes disturbing history of Parsifal performances from 1882 until 2004 is traced in vivid detail for the first time, demonstrating the abiding fascination exerted by this uniquely challenging work of art. Contributors: MaryA. Cicora, James M. McGlathery, Ulrike Kienzle, Warren Darcy, Roger Allen. William Kinderman and Katherine Syer teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and often lead study seminars during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.

'Hugely entertaining and inspiring' The Sunday Times One of The Sunday Times' 100 biographies to love The inspirational and colourful memoir of Michael Volpe, the general manager of Opera Holland Park. The son of Italian immigrants, he and his brothers were raised by his mother on a council estate in West London, before he attended Woolverstone Hall, a prestigious state boarding school designed to give bright inner city boys the opportunity of a public school education. Set against a backdrop of nuns, hit men, ice cream vans, rugby, gangsters, strict school masters and music, Noisy at the Wrong Times is the vibrant, funny, inspiring story of a boy who was given a chance - though whether he took it or not is another question... AS SEEN ON BBC ARTS' HIP HOP 2 OPERA

How did Paris and its musical landscape influence Verdi's La traviata? In this book, Emilio Sala re-examines La traviata in the cultural context of the French capital in the mid-nineteenth century. Verdi arrived in Paris in 1847 and stayed for almost two years: there, he began his relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi and assiduously attended performances at the popular theatres, whose plays made frequent use of incidental music to intensify emotion and render certain dramatic moments memorable to the audience. It is in one of these popular theatres that Verdi probably witnessed one of the first performances of Dumas fils' La Dame aux camelias, which became hugely successful in 1852. Making use of primary source material, including unpublished musical works, journal articles and rare documents and images, Sala's close examination of the incidental music of La Dame aux camelias - and its musical context - offers an invaluable interpretation of La traviata's modernity.

Opera is a visceral, emotional experience. No prior knowledge is needed to enjoy a soaring aria, or to be moved to laughter and to tears by popular operas like Carmen and La Boheme. But to fully appreciate this centuries-old art form, one must know its history and the many ways its component parts-music, poetry, theater-can be fit together. In A Mad Love, critic Vivien Schweitzer offers a lively introduction to opera, spanning from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1600, generally considered the first successful opera, to Dead Man Walking and Anna Nicole Smith in recent decades. Along the way, she introduces readers to the genre's most important composers, performers, and conductors, and to its key terminology, from coloratura to recitative. She recounts the longstanding debates about how best to pair story and song that have shaped opera over the centuries, highlighting some of the ways operas have shocked and delighted listeners. Dissecting opera's eclectic musical language, she equips readers to assess precisely how a particular performance succeeded or failed. There is undoubtedly a thrill to hearing a great opera singer fill a beautiful, historic theater with his or her unamplified voice. But today, opera ranges far beyond these traditional quarters; it is everywhere, from movie theaters to public parks and offbeat performance spaces to our earbuds. A Mad Love is an essential book for anyone who wants to appreciate this living, evolving art form in all its richness.