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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Opera
From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the
important influence of opera on Brecht's writings. Brecht at the
Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent
engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht
later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern
society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout
his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more
with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler,
and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous
work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the new concept
of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and
that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are
reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of
mimesis.
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Falstaff
(Paperback)
Giuseppe Verdi
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R1,165
R961
Discovery Miles 9 610
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The plays of Shakespeare inspired Verdi's deepest resources.
"Macbeth" (1847) was one of the composer's earliest
operatic-dramatic triumphs and "Otello" (1887) was among his
latest. At the end of his life Verdi astonished a public accustomed
to his tragic fervor with "Falstaff, " a gem of pure comedy.
Verdi's last great work premiered in the composer's 80th year. This
reproduction of the complete and unabridged score brings the final
proof of the maestro's universality to the many students,
musicians, and opera lovers who would see for themselves the
summation of Verdi's brilliant orchestral and compositional powers.
Ricordi was Verdi's original publisher; this reprint of his edition
contains the standard, definitive score and includes English
translations of the original front matter. "Falstaff" benefits from
Verdi's understanding of Wagner and other operatic innovators.
Nevertheless, between its concise but forceful orchestration and
its copious melodic invention, it remains singularly Verdian. Its
wit astonishes as much today as it did in 1893.
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human
character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music
(especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural
agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and
cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what
followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are
central: the tensions and traumas cultural, social, and personal
associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its
engagement and representation in music and film; and the more
general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the
development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role
played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the
book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature,
particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and
articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of
fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers
the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of
aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact
of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be
no turning back.
Benjamin Britten was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth
century. He wrote a feast of music from an early age, first
achieving international fame in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes;
now more operas by Britten are performed worldwide than by any
other composer born in the twentieth century. In this incisive
guide, John Bridcut discusses Britten's music and explores his
musical influences, his complex personality, his emotional and
professional relationships, and the fascinating nooks and crannies
of his daily life, normally overlooked. An indispensable source of
fresh insights into this towering figure in British music, this is
an updated edition of the Faber Pocket Guide to Britten, including
the full text of Britten's speech On Receiving the First Aspen
Award.
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La Traviata
(Paperback)
Giuseppe Verdi; Volume editing by Gary Khan
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R372
R303
Discovery Miles 3 030
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'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.
Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered one of
the most typically French as well as one of the most successful of
the opera composers of the 19th century. Although musically gifted,
he initially chose commerce as a career, but soon realized that his
future lay in music. He studied under Cherubini, and it was not
long before his opera-comique La Bergere Chateleine (1820), written
at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. Perhaps
the greatest turning point in Auber's life was his meeting with the
librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), with whom he developed a long
and illustrious working partnership that only ended with Scribe's
death. Success followed success; works such as Le Macon (1825) and
La Muette de Portici (1828) brought Auber public fame and official
recognition. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in
1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the
Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and
in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur.Auber seems to have
been fated to live in revolutionary times; during his long life no
less than four revolutions took place in France (1789, 1830, 1848,
1870). Auber's famous historical grand opera La Muette de Portici
(also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) is perhaps
unsurprisingly based on revolution, depicting the 1647 Neapolitan
uprising against Spanish rule. It is a key work in operatic
history, and has a revolutionary history itself: it was a
performance of this work in Brussels in 1830 that helped spark the
revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. It
was a revolution that hastened Auber's death at the old age of 89.
He died on 12 May 1871 as a result of a long illness aggravated by
the privations and dangers of the Siege of Paris. He had refused to
leave the city he had always loved, even after his house had been
set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. In a twist of fate, a
mark had been placed on the house of the composer of Masaniello,
the very voice of Romantic liberty!Auber's overtures were once
instantly recognizable, favourites of the light Classical
repertoire. His gracious melodies and dance rhythms had a huge
influence, both on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre
of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany. Musical tastes and
fashions have changed, and contemporary audiences are more
accustomed to the heavier fare of verismo, Wagnerian
transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism. The
operas themselves, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), are seldom
performed, yet Auber's elegant, delicate and restrained art remains
as appealing to the discerning listener as ever it was.Zerline, an
opera in three acts with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first
performed at the Academie nationale de musique (Salle de la rue Le
Peletier) on 16 May 1851. The scene is set in Palermo, during the
Restoration. The Prince of Roccanera, married to the sister of the
King, has a supposed niece, Gemma. She is really his daughter by
Zerline, an orange-seller. The latter was abducted by pirates, and
having returned to Palermo after many trials, now meets her
daughter, assuming the role of her aunt. She learns that Gemma
loves a young naval officer, Rodolphe, but that the Prince's wife
wishes Gemma to marry the King's cousin, much against the girl's
wishes. In the third act, Zerline, already alerted to an intrigue
compromising to the two young lovers, is able to safeguard their
integrity and bring about their union.The action is better suited
to a vaudeville than an opera, and the scenario has little innate
interest. The role of Zerline was devised especially for the great
contralto Marietta Alboni (1823-94), the first role she created.
The B-flat major overture immediately establishes the family nature
of the drama, with its parable of past sins, social disparity and
all-conquering maternal love.There is allusion to the Sicilian
setting in the two opening choruses of act 1 which are dominated by
barcarolle rhythms in establishing the couleur locale. Alboni's
magnificent talent added great value to the light music written by
Auber for this slight canvas. The work consequently contains many
pieces of a purely virtuoso nature. Among them are the grand air
d'entree "O Palerme! o Sicile!", the thematically central
canzonetta "Achetez mes belles oranges", and the duet for soprano
and contralto "Quel trouble en mon ame" in act 1. It is as though
the Italian setting of the story and the Italian origins of the
prima donna caused Auber to look to his early love for Rossini, and
his enduring attachment to Italian musical forms and local colour
(as in Fiorella, La Muette de Portici, Fra Diavolo, Acteon, La
Sirene, Zanetta and Haydee).The vocal part of Zerline is a
conscious re-creation of the old Rossini mode, and her various
solos are written in the style of the virtuoso contralto of the
opera seria, obviously with a contemporary Gallic fleetness all
Auber's own. The Grand Air demonstrates all the features.The
original cast was: Merly (Roccanera); Mlle Marietta Alboni
(Zerline); Mlle Maria-Dolores-Benedicta-Josephine Nau (Gemma);
Aimes (Rodolphe); Mlle Dameron (the Princess of Roccanera); and
Lyons (the Marquis of Bettura). The work was only performed 14
times in Paris, with no reprise. It was translated into Italian,
and produced in Brussels (in French) and London (in Italian).
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic
achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its
global renown, it remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of
its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the
absolute accuracy of the surviving scores, which date from almost
100 years after the work was written, cannot be assumed. In this
thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris closely
examines the many theories that have been proposed for the opera's
origin and chronology, considering the opera both as political
allegory and as a positive exemplar for young women. Her study
explores the work's historical position in the Restoration theater,
revealing its roots in seventeenth-century English theatrical and
musical traditions, and carefully evaluates the surviving sources
for the various readings they offer-of line designations in the
text (who sings what), the vocal ranges of the soloists, the use of
dance and chorus, and overall layout. It goes on to provide
substantive analysis of Purcell's musical declamation and use of
ground bass. In tracing the performance history of Dido and Aeneas,
Harris presents an in-depth examination of the adaptations made by
the Academy of Ancient Music at the end of the eighteenth century
based on the surviving manuscripts. She then follows the growing
interest in the creation of an "authentic" version in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through published editions
and performance reviews, and considers the opera as an important
factor in the so-called English Musical Renaissance. To a
significant degree, the continuing fascination with Purcell's Dido
and Aeneas rests on its apparent mutability, and Harris shows this
has been inherent in the opera effectively from its origin.
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