Gegenstand dieser Studie sind die Auswirkungen der Franzoesischen Revolution auf die Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts. Unter Berucksichtigung der Oper der franzoesischen Revolutionszeit, der neapolitanischen Oper unter franzoesischer Herrschaft und der historischen Opern Rossinis fur Paris wird die Grand opera als Produkt eines Austauschprozesses zwischen Pariser Inszenierungstraditionen und italienischer musikalischer Formgebung interpretiert. Anhand neu aufgefundener Quellen lasst diese Studie eine zentrale Epoche der Operngeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts in einem neuen Licht erscheinen, indem die haufig aggressive Dramaturgie der Grand opera wie auch des italienischen Melodramma des Risorgimento als Konsequenz der Schreckenserfahrungen der Franzoesischen Revolution gedeutet wird.

Achilles Tatius was a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt; he is now believed to have flourished in the second century CE. Of his life nothing is known, though the "Suidas" says he became a Christian and a bishop and wrote a work on etymology, one on the sphere, and an account of great men. He is famous however for his surviving novel in eight books, "The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, " one of the best Greek love stories. Clitophon relates to a friend the various difficulties which he and Leucippe had to overcome before they are happily united. The story is full of incident and readers are kept in suspense. There are many digressions giving scientific facts, myths, meditations, and so on, the interest of which redeems irrelevance.

In this unusual study, Emanuele Senici explores the connection between landscape and gender in Italian opera through the emblematic figure of the Alpine virgin. In the nineteenth century, operas portraying an emphatically virginal heroine, a woman defined by her virginity, were often set in the mountains, most frequently the Alps. The clarity of the sky, the whiteness of the snow and the purity of the air were associated with the 'innocence' of the female protagonist. Senici discusses a number of works particularly relevant to the origins, transformations and meanings of this conventional association including Bellini's La sonnambula (1831), Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix (1842), Verdi's Luisa Miller (1849), and Puccini's La fanciulla del West (1910). This convention presents an unusual point of view - a theme rather than a composer, a librettist, a singer or a genre - from which to observe Italian opera 'at work' over a century.

Die Richard Wagner-Sammlung der Zentralbibliothek der Universitatsbibliothek Bern verfugt mit uber 2'500 Titeln uber einen einzigartigen und reprasentativen Querschnitt durch 160 Jahre Wagner-Rezeption. Mit der Schenkung der privaten Sammlung von Paul Richard 1982 und durch die konsequente Erganzung von Erstdrucken und Forschungsliteratur durch die Bibliothek entstand eine bemerkenswerte Wagneriana mit Musikalien, Schriften und Sekundarliteratur, uber 700 Fotografien und etwa 200 Grafiken, Theaterzetteln und Plakaten. Eine Briefsammlung von 225 meist unveroeffentlichten Autographen von Richard Wagner und seinem engsten Freundeskreis erganzt die seltene Sammlung. Die Berner Wagneriana zeichnet sich insbesondere durch seltene Erstausgaben und langst vergriffene deutsch-, franzoesisch- und englischsprachige Dokumentationen aus. Die reich illustrierten Ausgaben von Wagners Dramentexten und Schriften zeichnen die Stilgeschichte der Buchillustration des spaten 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhunderts nach und nehmen manche Sujets heutiger Mystery- und Fantasyfilme vorweg. Die Veroeffentlichung des vorliegenden kommentierten Katalogs soll Anregung sein, in die Wagner-Rezeption mit all ihren Wucherungen, wunderlichen Philosophemen und ideologischen Vereinnahmungen einzusteigen.

Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narratives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. And for contemporary audiences, many of these characters - and the celebrated women who played them - still define opera at its finest and most searingly affective, even if storylines leave them swooning and faded by the end of the drama. The presence and representation of women in opera has been addressed in a range of recent studies that offer valuable insights into the operatic stage as cultural space, focusing a critical lens at the text and the position and signification of female characters. Moving that lens onto the historical, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century sheds light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled "doomed women" onstage before an audience. Editors Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss lead a cast of renowned contributors in an impressive display of current approaches to the lives, careers, and performances of female opera singers. Essential theoretical perspectives reflect several broad themes woven through the volume-cultures of celebrity surrounding the female singer; the emergence of the quasi-mythical figure of the diva; explorations of the intricate and sundry arts associated with the prima donna, and with her representation in other media; and the diversity and complexity of contemporary responses to her. The prima donna influenced compositional practices, determined musical and dramatic interpretation, and affected management decisions about the running of the opera house, content of the season, and employment of other artists - a clear demonstration that her position as "first woman" extended well beyond the boards of the operatic stage itself. The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is an important addition to the collections of students and researchers in opera studies, nineteenth-century music, performance and gender/sexuality studies, and cultural studies, as well as to the shelves of opera singers and enthusiasts.

Verdi bevorzugt C-Dur haufig fur die Maskierten und Demaskierten, A-Dur fur Autoritaten und B-Dur fur erotische Hochgefuhle; er portratiert die Unschuld gerne in E-Dur und die Auseinandersetzungen von Bass und Baritongestalten in f-Moll/F-Dur. Ausgehend von solchen Auffalligkeiten, fuhrt Peter Gisi die Leserschaft am roten Faden der zwoelf Tonartenpaare durch das Gesamtwerk des Komponisten und vermittelt ungewohnte Einsichten in typische Verdi-Themen wie Urangst, Wut, Heimatliebe, Aussenseitertum, Verganglichkeit, Entruckung. Bis anhin wenig Erforschtes - etwa die Symbolik von Feuer, Wasser, Kerker, Sturm - findet dabei gebuhrende Beachtung. Das 2001 bis 2012 entstandene Buch ist eine Hommage zu Verdis 200. Geburtstag. Es kann auch als Opern- und Konzertfuhrer benutzt werden und erweist sich "als wahres Fullhorn fur alle 'Kenner und Liebhaber', aber auch fur den spezialisierten Verdi-Forscher. Unser Wissen um bisher kaum erkannte Zusammenhange wird durch die vorliegende Untersuchung auf ein voellig neues Niveau gehoben." (Prof. Dr. Anselm Gerhard).

A team of scholars and writers examines important Romantic operas and traces the origins and development of a style created during an increasingly technical age. The volume analyzes grand operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy and discusses grand opera in Russia and Germany, and the Czechoslovakian territories, Italy, Britain and the Americas. The volume includes an essay by the renowned opera director David Pountney.

Die Verbindung der beiden Kunstgattungen Literatur und Musik zieht sich wie der sprichwoertliche rote Faden durch die Literatur - ebenso wie durch die Musikgeschichte. Doch was bedeutet die bekannte Feststellung "Wo die Sprache aufhoert beginnt die Musik"? Was bedeutet es, dass die Grenzen unserer Sprache die Musik zu ihrer Fortfuhrung machen? Es ist der ewige Wunsch, sobald wir Sprache verwenden, mit ihr mehr sagen zu wollen als wir sagen koennen - der Wunsch nach einer Sprache des Geistes und einer anderen des Herzens. Und als ware diese Sprache gefunden worden in der Oper, im Lied, sind Werke entstanden als eine Erfullung des Verlangens die Grenzen der Sprache zu uberwinden. Sprachlose Antworten sind es, die hier untersucht werden und dabei solchen literarischen Werken gegenubergestellt sind, die noch keine solche Erganzung erfahren haben.

Handel's Israelite oratorios are today little known among non-specialists, but in their own day they were unique, pioneering and extremely popular. Dating from the period 1732-1752, they combine the musical conventions of Italian opera with dramatic plots in English that are adaptations of Old Testament narratives. They constitute a form of biblical interpretation, but to date, there has been no thoroughgoing study of the theological ideas or the attitudes towards the biblical text that might be conveyed in the oratorios' libretti. This book aims to fill that gap from an interdisciplinary perspective. Combining the insights of present-day biblical studies with those of Handelian studies, Deborah W. Rooke examines the libretti of ten oratorios - Esther, Deborah, Athalia, Saul, Samson, Joseph and his Brethren, Judas Macchabaeus, Solomon, Susanna and Jephtha - and evaluates the relationship between each libretto and the biblical story on which it is based. Rooke comments on each biblical text from a modern scholarly perspective, and then compares the modern interpretation with the version of the biblical narrative that appears in the relevant libretto. Where the libretto is based on a prior dramatic or literary adaptation of the biblical narrative, she also discusses the prior adaptation and how it relates to both the biblical text and the corresponding oratorio libretto. In this way the distinctive nuances of the oratorio libretti are highlighted, and each libretto is then analysed and interpreted in the light of eighteenth-century religion, scholarship, culture and politics. The result is a fascinating exploration not only of the oratorio libretti but also of how culture and context determines the nature of biblical interpretation.

The story of the divine singer who could tame wild animals and enchant inanimate nature, and who for love of his wife descended to the underworld, has exercised a never-ending fascination throughout all epochs. It is therefore scarcely surprising that the myth of Orpheus became a source of inspiration and his figure a leading character for the new genre of opera, which was beginning to establish itself in the 17th century. The fate of the singer provided seven music dramas with their material, the metamorphoses of which cast light on baroque authors, their public and their age.

A characteristic feature of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera is the tendency to link scenes with numerous and often surprisingly lengthy orchestral interludes, frequently performed with the curtain closed. Often taken for granted or treated as a filler by audiences and critics, these interludes can take on very prominent roles, representing dream sequences, journeys and sexual encounters. Combining studies of individual musical texts with an investigation of the critical discourse surrounding the operas, Christopher Morris investigates the implications of these important but strangely overlooked passages.

Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner's obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhauser, Die Walkure, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer's "metaphysics of sexual love." A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner's achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed-as never before-how music could act on erotic impulse.

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.

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.

La Traviata featuring Beverly Sills, Nicolai Gedda, and Rolando Panerai, with Aldo Ceccato conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Also available:

La Boheme featuring Nicolai Gedda and Mirella Freni, with Thomas Schippers conducting the Orchestro e Coro del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma; 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. Carmen featuring 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.

Listen. Enjoy. Learn."

'La Traviata' was Giuseppe Verdi's eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from 'La Dame aux Camelias' by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valery and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its inevitable tragic outcome. It had its premiere at La Fenice in Venice in 1853 and has gone on to become one of the most performed and greatly loved of all operas. There are articles in the guide about Verdi's preparations for the first performances, a musical commentary, an overview of the opera's social background and an examination of how the libretto was adapted from Dumas's play. Also included are a survey of important performances and performers, sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, the full libretto and English translation, a discography, bibliography and DVD and website guides.

Patrick Barbier's entertaining and authoritative book is the first full study of the subject in the context of the baroque period. Covering the lives of more than sixty singers from the end of the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, he blends history and anecdote as he examines their social origins and backgrounds, their training and debuts, their brilliant careers their relationship with society and the Church, and their decline and death. The castrati became a legend that still fascinates us today. Thousands flocked to hear and see these singing hybrids - part man, part woman, part child - who portrayed virile heroes on the operatic stage, their soprano or contralto voices weirdly at variance with their clothes and bearing. The sole surviving scratchy recording tells us little of the extraordinary effect of those voices on their audiences - thrilling, unlike any sound produced by the normal human voice. Illustrated with photographs and engravings, the book ranges from the glories of patronage and adulation to the darker side of a fashion that exploited the sons of poor families, denied them their manhood and left them, when they were old, to decline into poverty and loneliness. It is a story that will intrigue opera-lovers and general readers alike, superbly told by a writer who has researched his subject with the thoroughness of a true enthusiast.

In Robert Ward's The Crucible: Creating an American Musical Nationalism, Robert Paul Kolt explores the life of the American composer Robert Ward through an examination of his most popular and enduring work, The Crucible. Focusing on the musical-linguistic relationships within the opera, Kolt demonstrates Ward's unique synthesis of text and music, one that lends itself to the perception of American musical nationalism. This book contains the most thorough and in-depth biography of Ward yet in print. Based on interviews with the composer, Kolt presents new information about Ward's life and career, focusing on his opera and examining the formation and construction of The Crucible's libretto and score, in turn offering new insights into the process of composing an opera. Kolt observes how the libretto's linguistic aspects helped Ward formulate the opera's melodic and rhythmic musical material. A detailed and unique analysis of the opera, particularly the musical and linguistic techniques Ward employed, demonstrates how these techniques lend themselves to the opera's reception as a work of American musical nationalism. The book also provides yet unpublished information on Arthur Miller's play, examining how it came to be written and soon after became the basis for Ward's work. Several appendixes provide a fuller picture, including a deleted scene from Miller's play and Ward's version of the scene, a chronological overview of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and illustrations and photo reproductions from Ward's manuscript.

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

Sarah Caldwell: The First Woman of Opera is the first biography of this significant musician, conductor, and director and documents Ms. Caldwell's genius as an indomitable force for opera in America. Caldwell mounted many U.S. premieres and brought rare editions of standard works to her audiences. At the height of her career, she raised her baton over four of the top five orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and conducted orchestras in such cities as Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Antonio, Atlanta, Mexico City, and Puerto Rico. She conducted ensembles in Canada, Sweden, South Africa, and Russia; was a musical director for Wolf Trap; and was the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. She founded the renowned Opera Company of Boston, as well as the outreach effort Opera New England and a nation-wide touring enterprise, the American National Opera Company. Caldwell's undeniable zeal was evident in whatever she undertook, and her accomplishments invite reflection, showing what an opera company could and should be in America. Daniel Kessler presents Ms. Caldwell's life in flashbacks and explores her 1978 landmark production of Gaetano Donizetti's Don Pasquale, which serves as a prime example of how she engaged with her creative Muse. He describes her personal and professional life, including her experience with the impresario Boris Goldovsky, her ability to create her own brand of "stage wizardry," and her moments of overreaching and hubris, such as her unorthodox fundraising methods and her experience with Imelda Marcos. Complete with several illustrations, a bibliography, an index, and the comprehensive annals of her three opera companies, Sarah Caldwell demonstrates what one person of genius, imagination, and passion can accomplish single-handedly.

In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his political ideas, his intellectual vision, and his powerful means of communicating them through his music. In his survey of the music itself, Budden emphasizes the unique character of each work as well as the developing sophistication of Verdi's style. He covers all of the operas, the late religious works, the songs, and the string quartet. A glossary explains even the most obscure operatic terms current in Verdi's time.

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.

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.

Die Zauberfloete had its premiere at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna on 30th September 1791, less than ten weeks before Mozart's death. It has proved to be one of the most enduringly popular of all his works and has enchanted generations of opera-goers of all ages. In a fairy-tale allegory imbued with serious philosophical concerns, the opera combines ethereal music with earthy comedy to convey a message of hope for a better world. In this guide, Nicholas Till writes about the background and genesis of the opera, locating it on the cusp of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of German Romanticism. Julian Rushton provides a detailed analysis of the score with numerous musical examples highlighting its many delights, and Hugo Shirley surveys the different and often bizarre permutations that the opera has undergone on stage since some of its very earliest performances through to the present day. The guide contains the complete German libretto with a new English translation by Kenneth Chalmers and incorporates all the dialogue so frequently cut in performances. There are sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, a discography, a bibliography and DVD and website guides. The guide provides a perfect companion to opera-goers wishing to extend their understanding and increase their enjoyment of this much beloved work.

Each entry in this New Grove series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed. These unique books compile the meticulously researched articles into organized narratives, designed to make finding information as easy as possible without sacrificing readability. Each volume is completely up-to-date, and includes a suggested listening guide and an eight-page glossy insert containing relevant illustrations. Each volume is a must-own for lovers of opera and classical music.
One of the best known and most admired figures in European music was Wolfgang Amade Mozart. His short but colorful life is of enduring interest, and his works remain central to the repertories of classical music. This book gives a concise and scholarly account of Mozart's activities as a composer of operas. It includes a concise biography, orientated towards the operas; an essay on Mozart's operatic contribution and style, and the antecedents to his operas; a separate synopsis and historical account of each opera; and three essays which bind into narrative form the dictionary entries on librettists, interpreters, and venues. There is a new introduction, a glossary of relevant terms, a list of operatic roles, and a guide to listening.

Two systems of timekeeping were in concurrent use in Venice between 1582 and 1797. Government documents conformed to the Venetian year (beginning 1 March), church documents to the papal year (from 1 January). "Song and Season" defines the many ways in which time was discussed, resolving a long-standing fuzziness imposed on studies of personnel, institutions, and cultural dynamics by dating conflicts. It is in this context that the standardization of timekeeping coincided with the collapse of the "dramma per musica" and the rise of scripted comedy and the "opera buffa," Selfridge-Field discloses fascinating relationships between the musical stage and the cultures it served, such as the residues of medieval liturgical feasts embedded in the theatrical year. Such associations were transmuted into lingering seasonal associations with specific dramatic genres. Interactions between culture and chronology thus operated on both general and specific levels. Both are fundamental to understanding theatrical dynamics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.