Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of "Giselle" at the Paris Opera (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opera during a period long celebrated for its box-office successes in both genres.

Smith begins by showing how gestures were encoded in the musical language that composers used in ballet and in opera. She moves on to a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the gestures of the singers and the movements of the dancers, and the distinction between dance that represents dancing (entertainment staged within the story of the opera) and dance that represents action. Smith maintains that ballet-pantomime and opera continued to rely on each other well into the nineteenth century, even as they thrived independently. The "divorce" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score for "Giselle.""

This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten, and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not only a long marriage and numerous private and professional vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in the visual arts, literature and music. Frances Spalding also sheds new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging, history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues that are very much to the fore in today's world. Myfanwy Piper is best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is nowadays called industrial archeology. His capacious and divided sensibility made him defender of many aspects of the English landscape and the built environment, while in his art he became an heir of that great tradition encompassing Wordsworth and Blake, Turner, Ruskin, and Samuel Palmer. He was torn between the pleasures of an abstract language liberated from time and place and those embedded in the locale, in buildings, geography, and history. Today, this expansive contradictoriness seems quintessentially modern, his divided response finding an echo in our own ambivalence towards modernity. Both Pipers created what seemed to many observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships, good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work, and creativity. Running through their lives is a fertile tension between a commitment to the new and a desire to reinvigorate certain native traditions. This tension produced work that is passionate and experimental. 'Only those who live most vividly in the present', John Russell observed of John and Myfanwy Piper, 'deserve to inherit the past'.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a partly spoken, partly sung performance piece by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson, and an exploration of the lives and myths of Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy-iconic beauties who lived millennia apart. A thrilling and thoughtful meditation on the destabilising and destructive power of beauty, it had its world premiere at The Shed in New York City, starring Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming.

Prominent components of Louis XIV's propaganda, the arts of spectacle also became sources of a potent resistance to the monarchy in late seventeenth-century France. With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.
With bold revisionist strokes, Cowart traces this strain of artistic dissent through the comedy-ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Moliere, the late operatic works of Lully and the operas of his sons, the opera-ballets of Andre Campra and his contemporaries, and the related imagery of Antoine Watteau's well-known painting "The Pilgrimage to Cythera." She contends that through a variety of means, including the parody of old-fashioned court entertainments, these works reclaimed traditional allegories for new ideological aims, setting the tone for the Enlightenment. Exploring these arts from the perspective of spectacle as it emerged from the court into the Parisian public sphere, Cowart ultimately situates the ballet and related genres as the missing link between an imagery of propaganda and an imagery of political protest.

The Companion is an essential, interdisciplinary tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner's Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, and giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent chapters, written by leading Wagner experts, focus on musical topics such as 'leitmotif', and structure, and provide a comprehensive set of character portraits, including leading players like Wotan, Brunnhilde, and Siegfried. Further chapters look to the mythological background of the work and the idea of the Bayreuth Festival, as well as critical reception of the Ring, its relationship to Nazism, and its impact on literature and popular culture, in turn offering new approaches to interpretation including gender, race and environmentalism. The volume ends with a history of notable stage productions from the world premiere in 1876 to the most recent stagings in Bayreuth and elsewhere.

The Real Traviata is the rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La Dame aux Camelias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans. Her life was painfully short, but by sheer willpower, intelligence, talent, and stunning looks she attained such prominence in the French capital that ministers of the government and even members of the French royal family fell under her spell. In the 1840s she commanded the kind of 'paparazzi' attention that today we associate only with major royalty or the biggest Hollywood stars. Aside from the younger Dumas, her conquests included a host of writers and artists, including the greatest pianist of the century, Franz Liszt, with whom she once hoped to elope. When she died Theophile Gautier, one of the most important Parisian writers of the day, penned an obituary fit for a princess. Indeed, he boldly claimed that she had been a princess, notwithstanding her peasant origin and her distinctly demi-monde existence. And although now largely forgotten, in the years immediately after her death, Marie's legend if anything grew in stature, with her immortalization in Verdi's La traviata, an opera in which the great Romantic composer tried to capture her essence in some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject. Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opera-comiques. Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

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.

"Don Giovanni" Captured considers the life of a single opera, engaging with the entire history of its recorded performance. Mozart's opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history has revealed a growing trend toward critique-an increasing effort on the part of performers and directors to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims. In "Don Giovanni" Captured, Richard Will sets out to analyze more than a century's worth of recorded performances of the opera, tracing the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. Will consults audio recordings, starting with wax cylinders and 78s, as well as video recordings, including DVDs, films, and streaming videos. As Will argues, recordings and other media shape our experience of opera as much as live performance does. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Don Giovanni to sit still. By choosing a work with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as a standard-bearer for evolving ideas about desire and power, both on and off the stage.

This highly original book draws on narrative and film theory, psychoanalysis, and musicology to explore the relationship between aesthetics and anti-Semitism in two controversial landmarks in German culture. David Levin argues that Richard Wagner's opera cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen" and Fritz Lang's 1920s film "Die Nibelungen" creatively exploit contrasts between good and bad aesthetics to address the question of what is German and what is not. He shows that each work associates a villainous character, portrayed as non-Germanic and Jewish, with the sometimes dramatically awkward act of narration. For both Wagner and Lang, narration--or, in cinematic terms, visual presentation--possesses a typically Jewish potential for manipulation and control. Consistent with this view, Levin shows, the Germanic hero Siegfried is killed in each work by virtue of his unwitting adoption of a narrative role.

Levin begins with an explanation of the book's theoretical foundations and then applies these theories to close readings of, in turn, Wagner's cycle and Lang's film. He concludes by tracing how Germans have dealt with the Nibelungen myths in the wake of the Second World War, paying special attention to Michael Verhoeven's 1989 film "The Nasty Girl." His fresh and interdisciplinary approach sheds new light not only on Wagner's "Ring" and Lang's "Die Nibelungen," but also on the ways in which aesthetics can be put to the service of aggression and hatred. The book is an important contribution to scholarship in film and music and also to the broader study of German culture and national identity.

Set in the American West during the California Gold Rush, "La fanciulla del West" marked a significant departure from Giacomo Puccini's previous and best- known works." Puccini and the Girl" is the first book to explore this important but often misunderstood opera that became the earliest work by a major European composer to receive an American premiere when it opened at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.
Adapted from American playwright David Belasco's Broadway production, The Girl of the Golden West, Fanciulla was Puccini's most consciously modern work, and its Met debut received mixed reviews. Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis base their account of its creation on previously unknown letters from Puccini to his main librettist, Carlo Zangarini. They mine musical materials, newspaper accounts, and rare photographs and illustrations to tell the full story of this controversial opera. Puccini and the Girl considers the production and reception of Puccini's "cowboy" opera in the light of contemporary criticism, providing both fascinating insight into its history and a look to the future as its centenary approaches.
"Engrossing. . . . An eminently readable, ideally direct and information-packed book."--William Fregosi, "Opera Today
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The Oxford Choral Classics series gathers together over three hundred of the world's choral masterpieces into a unique series of seven volumes. Each volume contains all of the established classics of its genre under a single cover, in authoritative new editions, at a budget price. Opera Choruses is the first volume in the series. Audiences will love these classic choruses, skillfully arranged as separate concert works and available for the first time together. Rutter has researched the best available sources and provided excellent English singing translations, as well as sensible and practical new keyboard reductions for rehearsal accompanists.

Covering over 1500 singers from the birth of opera to the present day, this marvelous volume will be an essential resource for all serious opera lovers and an indispensable companion to the enormously successful Grove Book of Operas.
The most comprehensive guide to opera singers ever produced, this volume offers an alphabetically arranged collection of authoritative biographies that range from Marion Anderson (the first African American to perform at the Met) to Benedict Zak (the classical tenor and close friend and colleague of Mozart). Readers will find fascinating articles on such opera stars as Maria Callas and Enrico Caruso, Ezio Pinza and Fyodor Chaliapin, Lotte Lehmann and Jenny Lind, Lily Pons and Luciano Pavarotti. The profiles offer basic information such as birth date, vocal style, first debut, most memorable roles, and much more. But these articles often go well beyond basic biographical information to offer colorful portraits of the singer's personality and vocal style, plus astute evaluations of their place in operatic history and many other intriguing observations. Many entries also include suggestions for further reading, so that anyone interested in a particular performer can explore their life and career in more depth. In addition, there are indexes of singers by voice type and by opera role premiers. The articles are mostly drawn from the acclaimed Grove Music Online and have been fully revised, and the book is further supplemented by more than 40 specially commissioned articles on contemporary singers.
A superb new guide from the first name in opera reference, The Grove Book of Opera Singers is a lively and authoritative work, beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white pictures. It is an essential volume--and the perfect gift--for opera lovers everywhere.

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna" Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.

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!

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) aimed to be more than just a composer. He set out to redefine opera as a "total work of art" combining the highest aspirations of drama, poetry, the symphony, the visual arts, even religion and philosophy. Equally celebrated and vilified in his own time, Wagner continues to provoke debate today regarding his political legacy as well as his music and aesthetic theories. "Wagner and His World" examines his works in their intellectual and cultural contexts.

Seven original essays investigate such topics as music drama in light of rituals of naming in the composer's works and the politics of genre; the role of leitmotif in Wagner's reception; the urge for extinction in "Tristan und Isolde" as psychology and symbol; Wagner as his own stage director; his conflicted relationship with pianist-composer Franz Liszt; the anti-French satire "Eine Kapitulation" in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; and responses of Jewish writers and musicians to Wagner's anti-Semitism. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Karol Berger, Leon Botstein, Lydia Goehr, Kenneth Hamilton, Katherine Syer, and Christian Thorau.

This book also includes translations of essays, reviews, and memoirs by champions and detractors of Wagner; glimpses into his domestic sphere in Tribschen and Bayreuth; and all of Wagner's program notes to his own works. Introductions and annotations are provided by the editor and David Breckbill, Mary A. Cicora, James Deaville, Annegret Fauser, Steven Huebner, David Trippett, and Nicholas Vazsonyi.

Casa Ricordi is the original publisher for the unforgettable Italian operas that have made their mark on musical history and now hold a special place in the hearts of millions of music lovers. Now, for the first time, Ricordi makes their full orchestral scores available to us with covers featuring beautiful color reproductions of authentic Ricordi artwork from opera posters, set designs and postcards from the turn of the century. Each edition features lyrics in the original language, and includes a synopsis of each act in English, Italian, German and French.

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.

Mit diesem Buch zu Problemen der Operettenubersetzung untersucht die Autorin ein Thema, das in der Wissenschaft nur vereinzelt behandelt wurde. Denn obwohl der Sprachmittler aktiv an der Erschaffung einer zielsprachigen Inszenierung beteiligt ist, wird sein Wirken im Theaterkontext oftmals marginalisiert oder gar ignoriert. Ziel der Autorin ist es, einen ersten Einblick in das Feld der Operettenubersetzung zu geben. Dazu zeigt sie Probleme wie Sangbarkeit, Sprechbarkeit und Auffuhrbarkeit auf und arbeitet mittels Erkenntnissen aus anderen wissenschaftlichen Bereichen Loesungsansatze heraus.

"Libretto-bashing has a distinguished tradition in the blood sport of opera," writes Arthur Groos in the introduction to this broad survey of critical approaches to that much-maligned genre. To examine, and to challenge, the long-standing prejudice against libretti and the scholarly tradition that has, until recently, reiterated it, Groos and Roger Parker have commissioned thirteen stimulating essays by musicologists, literary critics, and historians. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates that libretti are now very much within the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship. Libretti pose questions of intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history. They invite a broad spectrum of contemporary reading strategies ranging from the formalistic to the feminist. And as texts for music they raise issues in the relation between the two mediums and their respective traditions. Reading Opera will be of value to anyone with a serious interest in opera and contemporary opera criticism. The essays cover the period from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on works of the later nineteenth century. The contributors are Carolyn Abbate, William Ashbrook, Katherine Bergeron, Caryl Emerson, Nelly Furman, Sander L. Gilman, Arthur Groos, James A. Hepokoski, Jurgen Maehder, Roger Parker, Paul Robinson, Christopher Wintle, and Susan Youens. Originally published in 1988. 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

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 1994. 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

Those whose thoughts of musical theatre are dominated by the Broadway musical will find this book a revelation. From the 1850s to the early 1930s, when urban theatres sought to mount glamorous musical entertainment, it was to operetta that they turned. It was a form of musical theatre that crossed national borders with ease and was adored by audiences around the world. This collection of essays by an array of international scholars examines the key figures in operetta in many different countries. It offers a critical and historical study of the widespread production of operetta and of the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed. Furthermore, it challenges nationalistic views of music and approaches operetta as a cosmopolitan genre. This Cambridge Companion contributes to a widening appreciation of the music of operetta and a deepening knowledge of the cultural importance of operetta around the world.

Wie der Erstdruck vermerkt, vertonte Robert Schumann im Jahr 1849 die Ballade "Schoen Hedwig" op. 106 "fur Declamation mit Begleitung des Pianoforte". Unter derselben Besetzungsangabe wurden drei Jahre spater die "Ballade von Haideknaben" und "Die Fluchtlinge" op. 122 publiziert. Die Autorin untersucht die zeitgenoessischen positiven AEusserungen zu Schumanns Werken, die in einem Umfeld der grundsatzlichen Ablehnung des Melodrams markant hervortreten. Sie zeigt, wie vor allem die Konzertmelodramen tiefgreifende Einblicke in seine Musik- und Gattungsasthetik ermoeglichen: Mit dem Melodramatischen als Vertonungsstrategie betrat der Komponist - trotz einer uber siebzigjahrigen Gattungstradition - musikalisch neues Terrain.

Explicitly or not, the historical musicology of post-Revolutionary France has focused on Paris as a proxy for the rest of the country. This distorting lens is the legacy of political and cultural struggle during the long nineteenth century, indicating a French Revolution unresolved both then and now. In light of the capital's power as the seat of a centralizing French state (which provincials found 'colonizing') and as a cosmopolitan musical crossroads of nineteenth-century Europe, the struggles inherent in creating sustainable musical cultures outside Paris, and in composing local and regionalist music, are ripe for analysis. Replacement of 'France' with Paris has encouraged normative history-writing articulated by the capital's opera and concert life. Regional practices have been ignored, disparaged or treated piecemeal. This book is a study of French musical centralization and its discontents during the period leading up to and beyond the "provincial awakening" of the Belle Epoque. The book explains how different kinds of artistic decentralization and regionalism were hard won (or not) across a politically turbulent century from the 1830s to World War II. In doing so it redraws the historical map of musical power relations in mainland France. Based on work in over 70 archives, chapters on conservatoires, concert life, stage music, folk music and composition reveal how tensions of State and locality played out differently depending on the structures and funding mechanisms in place, the musical priorities of different communities, and the presence or absence of galvanizing musicians. Progressively, the book shifts from musical contexts to musical content, exploring the pressure point of folk music and its translation into "local color" for officials who perpetually feared national division. Control over composition on the one hand, and the emotional intensity of folk-based musical experience on the other, emerges as a matter of consistent official praxis. In terms of "French music" and its compositional styles, what results is a surprising new historiography of French neoclassicism, bound into and growing out of a study of diversity and its limits in daily musical life.