This book explains how and why Gluck’s historically important and best-loved opera Orfeo came into existence, and shows why it has retained its popularity. The work is placed in its context of Gluck’s ‘reform of opera’, an artistic movement involving actors, dancers, designers, writers and philosophers, as well as musicians and librettists. Patricia Howard and her fellow contributors describe how the opera has been reinterpreted during the two hundred years between its first performance and the present day. Differing twentieth-century views based on practical experience of the work are put forward by the conductors John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Charles Mackerras, the singer Kevin Smith and the English National Opera music consultant Tom Hammond.

Well-known for leading audiences to a new appreciation of Verdi as a subtle and elaborate musical thinker, Pierluigi Petrobelli here turns his attention to the intriguing question of how musical theater works. In this collection of lively, penetrating essays, Petrobelli analyzes specific operas, mainly by Verdi, in terms of historical context, musical organization, and dramaturgical conventions.

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Originally published in 1981, this is a one-volume paperback edition of Dr von Westernhagen's distinguished biography, first published in English by Cambridge University Press as a hardcover edition in two volumes. Its distinction was that it made use of fresh archive material, and took as its starting point the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry. Dr von Westerhagen quotes extensively from letters and diaries to throw light, for example, on Wagner's estrangement from Nietzsche. The author also consulted the contents of the composer's Dresden library and teenage composition exercises written for his teacher, Theodor Weinlig, to establish early influences upon him. Particularly useful features of this study are the appendices which include a chronological summary of Wagner's life, a complete list of his musical and literary compositions and a large bibliography. This is a definitive biography which stands beside Newman's classic work as an indispensable reference book for all studies of Wagner.

Abitare la battaglia, Gabriele Baldini's study of the operas of Verdi from Oberto to Un ballo in maschera, has, since its posthumous publication in 1970, received much critical acclaim both in Italy and elsewhere. Its lack of technical language makes it easily accessible to the general music lover, but its original and sometimes controversial ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion among Verdi specialists. The book's central concern is to present an analysis of Verdi the musical dramatist, and its conclusions constitute a radical reassessment of the vexed relationship between opera and literary form, between words and music. As Julian Budden says in his foreword: 'It blows a breath of fresh air into the weary platitudes of traditional Verdian criticism.' This English translation, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi, includes some new editorial additions, bringing various factual matters into line with recent Verdi scholarship. But the book's discussion of the music is always left to speak for itself. While many of the comments may offend the purist, they are always based on a profound knowledge and love of Verdi's operatic masterpieces as seen on the stage. They rarely fail to stimulate the reader into thinking more deeply about this immensely rich repertoire.

This book was first published in hard covers in 1976 to mark the centenary of the birth of Edward J. Dent, now best remembered as translator of Mozart's opera libretti, as author of the best-known popular introductory book, Opera (Penguin) and for his book on Mozart's Operas (Oxford). He was a scholar of great range and wrote with style and wit. For many years he was professor of Music at Cambridge. Deriving from a course of previously unpublished lectures, the book concentrates on the crucial romantic period and shows how romantic opera had its origins not in Germany, as is often thought, but in the music-dramas and operas of revolutionary France and that this music was a source of nineteenth-century German symphonic style as well as of grand opera. The book is edited by Winton Dean who supplied a brief introduction and a number of notes incorporating relevant scholarship.

Through a deft compilation of primary sources letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation.

Rather than retreading familiar ground with pages of historical and musical analysis, Rose places each opera firmly in the context of the composer s life and provides an engaging text in which the varied and colorful personalities involved are seen to discuss, comment, and contribute in one way or another to the progress of its composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Otello; and Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelleas et Melisande.

Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing he captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity, and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera s most enduring masterpieces."

Maria Callas continues to mesmerize us twenty years after her death, not only because she was indisputably the greatest opera diva of the 20th century, but also because both her life and death were shrouded in a Machiavellian web of scandal, mystery and deception. Now Anne Edwards, well known for her revealing and insightful biographies of some of the world’s most noted women, tells the intimate story of Maria Callas—her loves, her life, and her music, revealing the true woman behind the headlines, gossip and speculation.

The second daughter of Greek immigrant parents, Maria found herself in the grasp of an overwhelmingly ambitious mother who took her away from her native New York and the father she loved, to a Greece on the eve of the Second World War. From there, we learn of the hardships, loves and triumphs Maria experienced in her professional and personal life. We are introduced to the men who marked Callas forever—Luchino Visconti, the brilliant homosexual director who she loved hopelessly, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the husband thirty years her senior who used her for his own ambitions, as had her mother, and Aristotle Onassis, who put an end to their historic love affair by discarding her for the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Throughout her life, Callas waged a constant battle with her weight, a battle she eventually won, transforming herself from an ugly duckling into the slim and glamorous diva who transformed opera forever, whose recordings are legend, and whose life is the stuff of which tabloids are made.

Anne Edwards goes deeper than previous biographies of Maria Callas have dared. She draws upon intensive research to refute the story of Callas’s “mystery child” by Onassis, and she reveals the true circumstances of the years preceding Callas’s death, including the deception perpetrated by her close and trusted friend. As in her portraits of other brilliant, star-crossed women, Edwards brings Maria Callas—the intimate Callas—alive.

A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, Korngold and His World provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. This collection examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. The volume also features numerous historical documents-many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations-including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold. The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans. Bard Music Festival 2019 Korngold and His World Bard College August 9-11 and 16-18, 2019

Imagine learning Italian through opera. L'italiano con l'opera: Lingua, cultura e conversazione is a book that can help students do just that. Designed to supplement intermediate level programs, the book is rich enough to be used in courses emphasizing language, conversation, and/or culture. Six operas are examined: Il barbiere di Siviglia, La Boheme, Pagliacci, Otello, Tosca, and La traviata. L'italiano con l'opera offers serious fun for students, familiarizing them with great operas through discussion of well-known characters, plots, settings, themes, criticism, and interpretation while they acquire vocabulary, accuracy, and fluency.

Each richly detailed opera unit contains many interactive speaking activities, reading comprehension, contemporary vocabulary, grammar, and writing activities as well as a section focusing on a specific aria or duet. Students are encouraged to tell stories, interpret characters, express and react to opinions, use appropriate vocabulary, and analyze themes using modern Italian. The book includes recommended lists of high-quality opera recordings on videocassette, DVD, audiotape, and CD. Units of study are designed to be used with excerpts from English-subtitled opera videos or DVDs.

AEneas i Carthago von Joseph Martin Kraus bildete das umfangreichste und langwierigste Opernprojekt am Hofe des schwedischen Koenigs Gustav III. Das Libretto verfasste der Dichter Johan Henrik Kellgren nach einem Entwurf des Koenigs. Etwa ein Jahrzehnt, von 1781 bis 1792, wurde an dem opulenten Werk gearbeitet, ohne dass es zu einer Auffuhrung gekommen ware. Das permanente Scheitern erweist sich freilich aus Sicht der heutigen Forschung als Glucksfall, da die reichhaltig uberlieferten Quellen Entstehung und Entwicklung der Oper anschaulich dokumentieren. Jens Dufner untersucht die dramaturgische und musikalische Umsetzung des Aeneas-Stoffes am schwedischen Hof und analysiert anhand der Genese von Libretto und Musik die komplexen Rahmenbedingungen der "gustavianischen Oper".

Titles in The Listener s Companion: A Scarecrow Press Music Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume explains in clear and accessible language how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Looking at the context in which the music appeared as well as its form, authors explore with readers the environments in which key musical works were written and performed from a 1950s bebop concert at the Village Vanguard to a performance of Handel s Messiah in eighteenth-century Germany. Along with his contemporaries Chopin and Wagner, Verdi is among the few composers whose place in the musical pantheon is based almost entirely upon the mastery of a single genre. This is largely owing to his staggering output in a career that lasted over fifty years. Several of his operas occupy the nucleus of the modern repertoire, and Verdi almost single-handedly maintained the Italian lyric tradition against the tide of Wagnerian music drama. In his final years, he virtually reinvented Italian opera. Indeed, Verdi s life and music came to be so intimately associated with the Italian unification movement known as the Risorgimento that he is still revered as a great national figure in his homeland. In Experiencing Verdi: A Listener s Companion, Donald Sanders combines biography with simple, concise musical analysis. Summarizing the evolution of Italian opera and the bel canto tradition that prevailed at the beginning of Verdi s career, Sanders takes readers on a leisurely tour of eleven of Verdi s most important operas and of the Manzoni Requiem and concludes with a look at Verdi s influence on later composers like Giacomo Puccini, his place in the modern repertoire, and his role as an Italian patriot. With a timeline, glossary of basic musical terms, and selected reading and listening recommendations, Experiencing Verdi will engage opera lovers at all levels, from those just starting to listen, learn, and enjoy to musical devotees."

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.

Opera recordings have been with us since the creation of the first wax cylinders. Now at a time when the 25-year reign of the compact disc appears to be coming to an end is the moment to take stock of the history of recordings of arguably the most popular composer of operas, Giacomo Puccini. In Giacomo Puccini: A Discography, librarian and music historian Roger Flury looks at each opera chronologically from Le Villi to Turandot, followed by sections on Puccini's instrumental, chamber, orchestral, and solo vocal works. Details of each complete opera are listed by recording date, followed by excerpts in the order in which they occur in the opera. Recordings of each aria are listed alphabetically by the name of the artist. For ease of use, Flury establishes as the main criteria for inclusion those recordings assigned a commercial issue number and available for purchase. This book does not limit itself to mainstream recordings but includes as well 'unofficial' recordings taken from broadcasts or illegally recorded in theaters, ensuring that the audio recording history of Puccini is free of gaps. (Video and DVD issues, whether of staged performances or excerpts in concert, are not included unless they have been issued in a sound-only format.) This volume brings together information on nearly 10,000 recordings of Puccini's music. It provides a comprehensive overview of the recorded history of the composer's works and serves as a useful guide for the transfer of recordings from one format to another.

Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville surveys the opera's fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted in spectators and critics from the nineteenth century to the present. Opening with a wide-ranging overview of the types of alterations that have been imposed on Rossini's score for the past two centuries, the first chapter addresses the mechanics behind these changes as well as the cultural forces that both fostered and encouraged them. The book next looks at some of the opera's earliest revivals, drawing attention to alterations that were made to the score and to individual singers who were responsible for the changes, especially those who appeared in the roles of Almaviva and Bartolo. An entire chapter is devoted to Rosina, examining the wide array of creative liberties that prima donnas have unremittingly and unrepentantly taken with their interpretations of Rossini's character. The final sections turn to the opera's recent history, observing how the Rossini Renaissance brought with it a new dedication to the "work concept" and to shedding the types of alterations that had long characterized performances of this work. The book closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the myriad ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded, digitized, and commodified glory.

This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai's most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women's struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.

The study of singers' art has emerged as a prominent area of inquiry within musicology in recent years. Female Singers on the French Stage, 1830-1848 shifts the focus from the artwork onstage to the labour that went on behind the scenes. Through extensive analysis of primary source documents, Kimberly White explores the profession of singing, operatic culture, and the representation of female performers on the French stage between 1830 and 1848, and reveals new perspectives on the social, economic, and cultural status of these women. The book attempts to reconstruct and clarify contemporary practices of the singer at work, including vocal training, debuts, rehearsals and performance schedules, touring, benefit concerts, and retirement, as well as the strategies utilized in publicity and image making. Dozens of case studies, many compiled from singers' correspondence and archival papers, shed light on the performers' successes and struggles at a time when Paris was the operatic centre of Europe.

A timeless tale of love, lust, and politics, "Tosca" is one of the most popular operas ever written. In "Tosca's Rome," Susan Vandiver Nicassio explores the surprising historical realities that lie behind Giacomo Puccini's opera and the play by Victorien Sardou on which it is based. By far the most "historical" opera in the active repertoire, " Tosca" is set in a very specific time and place: Rome, from June 17 to 18, 1800. But as Nicassio demonstrates, history in "Tosca" is distorted by nationalism and by the vehement anticlerical perceptions of papal Rome shared by Sardou, Puccini, and the librettists. To provide the historical background necessary for understanding "Tosca," Nicassio takes a detailed look at Rome in 1800 as each of "Tosca"'s main characters would have seen it - the painter Cavaradossi, the singer Tosca, and the policeman Scarpia. Finally, she provides a scene-by-scene musical and dramatic analysis of the opera.

Published in 1913, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. In the 1970s, Benjamin Britten adapted it into an opera, and Luchino Visconti turned it into a successful film. Reading these works from a philosophical perspective, Philip Kitcher connects the predicament of the novella's central character to Western thought's most compelling questions. In Mann's story, the author Gustav von Aschenbach becomes captivated by an adolescent boy, first seen on the lido in Venice, the eventual site of Aschenbach's own death. Mann works through central concerns about how to live, explored with equal intensity by his German predecessors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Kitcher considers how Mann's, Britten's, and Visconti's treatments illuminate the tension between social and ethical values and an artist's sensitivity to beauty. Each work asks whether a life devoted to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of lasting achievements can be sustained and whether the breakdown of discipline undercuts its worth. Haunted by the prospect of his death, Aschenbach also helps us reflect on whether it is possible to achieve anything in full awareness of our finitude and in knowing our successes are always incomplete.

Initially based on Scenes de la vie de boheme (1851), La boheme follows the trials and tribulations of young artists struggling to make ends meet. Despite their circumstance, they celebrate small wins, while seeking love and opportunity. La boheme is an Italian opera that centers a group of up-and-coming artists. This includes Rodolfo, a poet, Mimi, a seamstress, Marcello, a painter and Musetta, a singer. Together, they attempt to earn a living from their respective crafts. Rodolfo and Marcello struggle to maintain their relationships with Mimi and Musetta, who are likely to attract wealthier suitors. In the midst of romance troubles and a professional drought, Mimi's health becomes a cause for concern. La boheme is a captivating story about friendship, love and survival. Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica's opera offers a compelling narrative with memorable moments. It's a romantic tale that highlights hope in the face of tragedy. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of La boheme is both modern and readable.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape - on stage and beyond - which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge's Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: "Total Commitment," "Freedom," "Reality Outrivals Theater," "The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom," "A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are)," and "Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera." An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera "is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we." He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: "Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off)."

In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose. "This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way."--Robert Bailey, New York University"

The production of Wagner's operas is fiercely debated. In this groundbreaking stage history Patrick Carnegy vividly evokes the-often scandalous-great productions that have left their mark not only on our understanding of Wagner but on modern theatre as a whole. He examines the way in which Wagner himself staged his works, showing that the composer remained dissatisfied with even the best of his productions. After Wagner's death the scenic challenge was taken up by the Swiss visionary Adolphe Appia, by Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller in Vienna, and by Otto Klemperer and Ewald Dulberg in Berlin. In Russia the Bolsheviks reinvented Wagner as a social revolutionary, while cinema left its indelible imprint on the Wagnerian stage with Eisenstein's Die Walkure in Moscow in 1940. Hitler famously appropriated Wagner for his own ends. Patrick Carnegy unscrambles the interaction of politics and stage production, describing how post-war German directors sought a way to bury the uncomfortable past. The book concludes with a critique of the iconoclastic interpretations by Patrice Chereau, Ruth Berghaus, and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape - on stage and beyond - which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

"La traviata" was initially far from a success, Verdi declared its 1853 premiere a "fiasco," and later reworked parts of five pieces in the first two acts, retaining the original setting for the rest. The first performance of the new version in 1854 was a tremendous success, and the opera was quickly taken up by theatres around the world. This critical edition presents the 1854 version as the main score, and also makes available the full score and the original 1853 settings of the revised pieces. For this text Fabrizio della Seta used the composer's autograph and many secondary sources, but also Verdi's previously unknown sketches. These sketches helped corroborate the original readings and illuminate the work's compositional stages. A detailed critical commentary discusses source problems and anbiguities.