Nothing strikes the ear quite like a soprano singing in the sonic stratosphere. Whether thrilling, chilling, or repellent to the listener, the reaction to cascades of coloratura with climaxing high notes is strong. Coloratura-agile, rapid-fire singing-was originally essential for all singers, but its function changed greatly when it became the specialty of particular sopranos over the course of the nineteenth century. The central argument of Vocal Virtuosity challenges the historical commonplace that coloratura became an anachronism in nineteenth-century opera. Instead, the book demonstrates that melismas at mid-century were made modern. Coloratura became an increasingly marked musical gesture during the century with a correspondingly more specific dramaturgical function. In exploring this transformation, the book reveals the instigators of this change in vocal practice and examines the historical traces of Parisian singers who were the period's greatest exponents of vertiginous vocality as archetypes of the modern coloratura soprano. The book constructs the historical trajectory of coloratura as it became gendered the provenance of the female singer, while also considering what melismas can signify in operatic performance. As a whole, it argues that vocal virtuosity was a source of power for women, generating space for female authorship and creativity. In so doing, the book reclaims a place in history for the coloratura soprano.

The reception accorded to Jacques Offenbach's (1819-1880) stage works is traditionally dominated by concepts such as 'satire' or 'parody'. But the insistence on such categories fails to do justice to the heterogeneous nature of his oeuvre. One way of remedying this defect is to examine the works in the literary and dramatic context of the age in which they were written. Paradigmatic for the preoccupation with moral discourse typical of that age is Alexandre Dumas fils' essay AThA(c)A[tre utileA. The study sets out to demonstrate that at an idealistic level Dumas fils and Offenbach had more in common than has been hitherto supposed.

Starting in the late 18th century a development is observable in which a new theatrical aesthetic of dramatic speech exploiting the musical potential of the voice went hand in hand with an abundance of melo-dramatic forms. Cutting across the boundaries of genre and the customary distinction between spoken art and music, theoreticians and practitioners explored the declamatory use of speech as a musical phenomenon in its own right. The present interdisciplinary study examines the development of this historical combination of the speaking voice and the musical arts, concentrating in particular on the profusion of different forms of 'Melodram' in the period in question.

The English tenor, Peter Pears, made a unique contribution to British musical life, not only through his own singing, but as the inspiration and muse of his life-long companion Benjamin Britten, who created for Pears some of the greatest tenor roles in 20th-century opera. This book describes Pears's life, his childhood and school days at Lancing College, his abortive academic career at Oxford and his early professional work as a member of the BBC singers. The first half of this book culminates in Pears's meeting with Britten in the 1930s, and their relationship consolidated during their wartime years in America, and by the fruitfulness of their artistic collaboration which resulted in several extraordinary song cycles and a number of inspirational roles on the stage including Grimes in Peter Grimes, Captain Vere in Billy Budd and Aschenbach in Death in Venice.

'Wingbeats' was an ambitous cultural project inspired by our perennial wish to fly and the paradoxical question: how can we fly without leaving the ground? Over a period of two years, the project brought together international and UK artists, school children, university students and residents of the East Riding to create two ambitous operas performed in Leeds and Bridlington. For this book, Adam Strickson, lead artist for Wingbeats, has compiled a fascinating selection of material from the project including poems, excerpts from diaries and blogs, and the full texts of both operas.

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.

This is the first book to compare these two composers and cultural heroes, both of whom were born in 1813 and achieved huge national and international renown in their lifetimes. Yet not only did they never meet, but the differences between them in music, culture, environment, significance, and legacy were profound.

Peter Conrad begins his tale in a public park in Venice, home to a pair of statues of the composers that are positioned so as to appear to shun each other. This provides a fitting starting point for his argument that they represent two opposite yet equally integral and compelling dimensions of European culture: north versus south, cerebral versus sensual, proud solitude versus human connection, epic mythmaking versus humane magnanimity. The book is a richly argued tour de force that engages passionately and profoundly with music, biography, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, and culture in the broadest sense. As Conrad concludes, At one time or another, if not simultaneously, we still need the two contradictory, complementary kinds of music that Verdi and Wagner left us. "

Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the 'Viceroy of Naples', Barbaja managed both the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and La Scala in Milan. He was the influential force behind the careers of a plethora of artists including Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini and the great mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran, who became Barbaja's lover before eventually deserting him to marry Rossini. Most vitally, Barbaja's vision had an irrevocable impact on the history of Italian opera; determined to create a lucrative business, he cultivated an energetic environment of new artists producing innovative, exciting opera that people would flock to hear. Philip Eisenbeiss brilliantly pieces together the forgotten story of a tireless tyrant who began life as a barely educated coffee waiter, yet grew to be one of the richest and most potent men in Italy. A natural entrepreneur, Barbaja had the ability to predict a sensation; a skill he exploited his entire life, forging his fortune as a cafe-owner, arms profiteer, gambling tycoon and eventually, opera magnate. Eisenbeiss unlocks the enigma of this eccentric and fascinating personality that has been hitherto neglected.

Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer and one of the few artists who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden. His trailblazing career carved the way for a host of African American artists, including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. Performing the African American spirituals he was raised on, Hayes's voice was marked with a unique sonority which easily navigated French, German, and Italian art songs. A multiculturalist both on and off the stage, he counted among his friends George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, Pearl Buck, Dwight Eisenhower, and Langston Hughes. This engaging biography spans the history of Hayes's life and career and the legacy he left behind as a musician and a champion of African American rights. It is an authentic, panoramic portrait of a man who was as complex as the music he performed.

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.

Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Zizek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.