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Insights into an opera stage director's work from an
internationally acclaimed director and teacher. Opera is nowadays
performed worldwide. But as an art form it is little understood by
performers and audiences alike. The Crafty Art of Opera wants to
change that. Here, Michael Hampe brings glimpses of the director's
work to a wider audience, uncovering the many techniques and rules
that should inform an opera's staging: the need for singers to know
their orchestra, the importance of space around singers, the
gestures of languages, what we all can learn from Mozart, and the
primacy of sense over effect, to name but a few. He shows how
stories, through music, become tangible and real. Packed with many
anecdotes from the author's luminous career, this book is
dedicatedto opera-lovers who want to understand 'how it is done';
to opera-makers who want to better understand their craft; and,
last but not least, to those who loathe opera, in order to prove
them wrong. Eminently readable, it brings both insight and wit from
a life spent in opera as director and teacher. MICHAEL HAMPE is an
internationally acclaimed opera stage director. The Crafty Art of
Opera was published in German as Opernschule.
A well-researched and exhaustive analysis of the role of women in
Wagner's operas. Richard Wagner's music contains some of the most
powerful portrayals of emotions in all opera, particularly love.
Eva Rieger presents a new picture of the composer, showing how the
women at his side inspired him and how closely his life and art
intertwined. We follow Wagner's restless hunt for the 'ideal
woman', her appointed task being to give him shelter, warmth,
inspiration, adventure and redemption, all in one. He could hardly
have desired anything more contradictory, and this is reflected in
the female characters of his operas. They are all in some way torn,
faltering between their own desire for self-realization and the
societal constraints that impel them to sacrificethemselves for
their men. Rieger bids farewell to essentialist, naturalized
notions of femininity and masculinity. Her investigations are both
comprehensive and convincing, for she avoids the pitfalls of
imposing extraneousinterpretation, instead focussing keenly on the
music itself. EVA RIEGER is Professor Emeritus in Historical
Musicology at the University of Bremen and lives in the
principality of Liechtenstein.
The first modern English edition of Richard Wagner's essays on
conducting, extensively annotated, with a critical essay on Wagner
as conductor: his aesthetic, practices, vocabulary, and impact.
Richard Wagner was one of the leading conductors of his time.
Through his disciples Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, Anton Seidl,
Felix Mottl, Arthur Nikisch, and their many notable protégés, a
Wagnerian art of interpretation became the norm in Europe and
America until well into the twentieth century. Wagner's essays on
conducting had an even longer impact, and were upheld as central to
their art by later generations of conductors from Mahler to
Strauss, Furtwängler, Böhm, Scherchen, and beyond. This is the
first complete, modern translation of Wagner's conducting essays to
appear in English, and the first-ever edition to offer extensive
annotations explaining their reception and impact. The accompanying
critical essay offers a detailed analysis of Wagner's conducting
practices, his innovations in tempo and the art of transition, his
creation of a new vocabulary to describe his art, and his success
in establishing a school of conductors to promote his works and his
aesthetic. A digital edition of this book is openly available
thanks to generous support from the Swiss National Science
Foundation.
The first extensive study of the life and music of the Swiss
composer, Richard Flury (1896-1967). The late-Romantic composer
Richard Flury (1896-1967) was born in Biberist, a tiny town outside
the Baroque city of Solothurn in northern Switzerland. He went to
school in Solothurn, later taught there, conducted its orchestra,
andhad his operas and ballets performed at the local theatre by its
semi-professional ensemble. But Flury was more than just another
conservative composer stuck in the provinces. His teachers included
Ernst Kurth and JosephMarx of Vienna, and his music was performed
by conductors such as Felix Weingartner and Hermann Scherchen and
star instrumentalists like Wilhelm Backhaus and Georg Kulenkampff.
His first opera was conducted by a former student ofBerg and
Schoenberg who became his staunch advocate, and during the Second
World War Flury worked closely with several Jewish emigre writers
and musicians from Germany and Czechoslovakia. In his music of the
early 1930s, the influence of Berg and Hindemith became apparent as
Flury dabbled in modernism and free tonality before moving back to
a more traditionalist stance; but he was also a fine tunesmith who
loved writing Viennese waltzes and violin miniatures after the
manner of Kreisler. In both his aesthetic and his career, Flury
offers a fascinating case of a man negotiating constantly between
the centre and the periphery - and composing some very good music
in the process.The book includes a 23 track CD of Flury's music.
CHRIS WALTON teaches music history at the Basel University of Music
in Switzerland. He is the author of Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works
(2009) and Richard Wagner's Zurich: The Muse of Place (2007).
This biography of Minna Planer, Richard Wagner's wife of 30 years,
reveals her as a self-assured woman and artist who was vital to her
husband's creative life. When Richard Wagner first met Minna Planer
in 1834, he was an unknown conductor, she a popular actress. His
hectic pursuit of her affections culminated in marriage in 1836.
Minna endured poverty with him, nursed him through chronic illness,
followed him across Europe as he fled from creditors and pursued
his artistic goals, and sought to provide him with the stable
domestic and erotic life that he craved. He played his works to her
as he wrote them, up to Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and set store by
her opinions. But when he went on the run as a wanted
revolutionary, Minna only reluctantly followed him into Swiss
exile. Domestic peace tentatively prevailed, but was ultimately
destroyed by Wagner's passion for Mathilde Wesendonck. In 1858, he
and Minna separated, she returned home to Germany, and subsequent
efforts at reconciliation proved ultimately impossible. They
remained married, however, until Minna's death in 1866. Despite
having been at Richard's side as he matured into the composer of
the Ring and Tristan, Minna has been given short shrift by most
Wagner commentators. In Eva Rieger's acclaimed biography,
translated into English by Chris Walton, the author reveals Minna
as a self-assured woman and artist who played a crucial role in the
creative life of her husband.
Gordon Jephtas (1943–92) was born into an impoverished, coloured, single-parent family in South Africa. He began piano lessons after being intrigued by the harmonium player at the local church. In his teens he worked as an accompanist with the amateur coloured opera group “Eoan” in Cape Town, then moved to Europe to further his studies. His first big break came in 1972 when the Zurich Opera House appointed him to assist the conductor Nello Santi. Jephtas thereafter established an international reputation as a vocal coach of Italian opera, and Switzerland provided him with a liberal environment where he was free to express his sexuality. Both there and later in the USA, Jephtas worked with the biggest names in the opera world, from Renata Tebaldi to Plácido Domingo, Montserrat Caballé and Luciano Pavarotti. He always longed to be accepted back in South Africa, but his attempts to return culminated each time in disaster because talent and experience meant little in a land where “whiteness” trumped everything. An official offer to be made an “honorary white” merely intensified his inner turmoil. Back in the USA, Jephtas’s professional success was tempered by private misfortune. He died in New York in 1992.
This book examines the life and career of Gordon Jephtas through the letters that he wrote home to May Abrahamse, a coloured singer with whom he had worked since his teens. They reveal in unique detail the life and achievements of a remarkable musician, but also the psychological damage wrought upon him by apartheid. Jephtas provides a fascinating case study of a gifted South African abroad, struggling with issues of race and sexuality at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Reveals the brilliant musical and pedagogical thinking of the famed
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Neapolitan composer and
teacher of royal students. Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) was one
of the most important composers of opera in the eighteenth century.
His operas were performed throughout Europe, and his fame led to
appointments as a maestro di cappella and composer at prominent
European courts. This book is the first study to address his work
as a teacher of composition and what we would today call music
theory. The practice of partimento (figured or unfigured bass
lines) was an integral part of the training of musicians at the
renowned conservatories in eighteenth-century Naples. By employing
these often-unprepossessing partimento bass lines, young musicians
learned the techniques of variation, improvisation, and composition
while seated at the harpsichord. Paisiello's Regole per bene
accompagnare il Partimento (Rules for Harpsichordists; 1782)
survives in both autograph and printed forms. It contains forty-six
partimenti that have long been considered the core of his pedagogic
oeuvre. However, two recently discovered manuscripts contain a
further forty-one unknown partimenti, notated as two- and
three-part disposizioni (realizations). The present study offers
numerous insights gleaned from the surviving sources and bolsters
our understanding of how to perform the music of Paisiello and his
contemporaries: music that has often survived in an incomplete
form. These findings are relevant not just for keyboard players but
also for singers, instrumentalists, and anyone interested in the
inner workings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music.
This biography of Minna Planer, Richard Wagner's wife of 30 years,
reveals her as a self-assured woman and artist who was vital to her
husband's creative life. When Richard Wagner first met Minna Planer
in 1834, he was an unknown conductor, she a popular actress. His
hectic pursuit of her affections culminated in marriage in 1836.
Minna endured poverty with him, nursed him through chronic illness,
followed him across Europe as he fled from creditors and pursued
his artistic goals, and sought to provide him with the stable
domestic and erotic life that he craved. He played his works to her
as he wrote them, up to Tannhauser and Lohengrin, and set store by
her opinions. But when he went on the run as a wanted
revolutionary, Minna only reluctantly followed him into Swiss
exile. Domestic peace tentatively prevailed, but was ultimately
destroyed by Wagner's passion for Mathilde Wesendonck. In 1858, he
and Minna separated, she returned home to Germany, and subsequent
efforts at reconciliation proved ultimately impossible. They
remained married, however, until Minna's death in 1866. Despite
having been at Richard's side as he matured into the composer of
the Ring and Tristan, Minna has been given short shrift by most
Wagner commentators. In Eva Rieger's acclaimed biography,
translated into English by Chris Walton, the author reveals Minna
as a self-assured woman and artist who played a crucial role in the
creative life of her husband.
The first-ever biography of Richard Wagner's artistically gifted
granddaughter who fought against Hitler's Germany but achieved no
personal success for her troubles. She was not the 'black sheep' of
her family, as often claimed, but a heroic rebel. Friedelind Wagner
(1918-1991), Richard Wagner's independent-minded granddaughter,
daughter of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, despised her
mother'sclose liaison with Adolf Hitler and was the only member of
the Wagner clan who fled Germany in protest. Although Winifred
warned her that the Nazis would 'exterminate' her, should she
continue her open opposition, she travelled toLondon and published
articles pillorying the Nazi élite. All the same, her former
proximity to Hitler & Co. made her suspicious in the eyes of
the authorities, who promptly interned her. Even the British
Parliament debated her fate. Only with the help of the world-famous
conductor Arturo Toscanini was she able to gain an exit visa. Once
she arrived in New York she broadcast, lectured and published
against the Nazis, wrote an autobiography, and became friends with
many other emigrants including singers who had themselves abandoned
Bayreuth. After the war the Mayor of Bayreuth asked her to run the
Festival, but she declined in favour of her brothers. They showed
little gratitude, however, for after Friedelind returned to Germany
in 1953 she found herself manoeuvred out of any role in the
Festival management. She still made a remarkable effort to find a
niche in post-war German society and culture, and did her best to
cope with a family notorious for its intrigues past and present.
Friedelind Wagner remained a staunch friend of artists such as
Wilhelm Furtwängler, Frida Leider, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber,
Leonard Bernstein, WalterFelsenstein, Michael Tilson Thomas and
many others. Drawing on archival research in many countries, Eva
Rieger has here written the first-ever biography of Richard
Wagner's talented, artistic granddaughter who fought
againstHitler's Germany, but achieved no personal success for her
troubles. Her book gives many new insights into wartime and postwar
musical life in Germany, Europe and the United States. EVA RIEGER
is a feminist musicologist and author of many books on music.
An investigation of the considerable influence of Wagner's stay in
Zurich from 1849 to 1858 -- a period often discounted by scholars
-- on his career. When the people of Dresden rose up against their
king in May 1849, Richard Wagner went from Royal Kapellmeister to
republican revolutionary overnight. He gambled everything, but the
rebellion failed, and he lost all. Now a wantedman in Germany, he
fled to Zurich. Years later, he wrote that the city was "devoid of
any public art form" and full of "simple people who knew nothing of
my work as an artist." But he lied: Zurich boasted arguably the
world's greatest concentration of radical intellectuals and a
vibrant music scene. Wagner was accepted with open arms. This book
investigates Wagner's affect on the musical life of the city and
the city's impact on him. Mathilde Wesendonck emerges not as
Wagner's passive muse but as a self-assured woman who exploited
gender expectations to her own benefit. In 1858, Wagner had to flee
Zurich after again gambling everything -- this time on Mathilde --
and again losing.But it was in Zurich that Wagner wrote his major
theoretical works; composed Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and parts
of Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde; first planned Parsifal; held
the first festival of his music; and conceived of a theater to
stage his own works. If Wagner had been free in 1849 to choose a
city in which to seek heightened intellectual stimulation among the
like-minded and the similarly gifted, he could have come to nomore
perfect place. Chris Walton teaches music history at the
Musikhochschule Basel in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the
2010 Max Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the
literary and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the
English-speaking world.
In this groundbreaking book, the new understanding of the mind-body
connection is revealed and you are guided on a journey toward the
life you want but haven't yet achieved. Your level of confidence,
health, wealth, happiness and success is a direct reflection of the
beliefs hidden away in your subconscious mind. Now you can identify
those beliefs that are self-sabotaging and replace them with
self-affirming beliefs that allow you to express a new level of
potential. You will learn the amazing research that explains just
how powerful and Incredible You really are and unique and easy to
use Mind-Body Techniques that will: Remove subconscious self-
limiting beliefs and blocks to success Clear any emotional stress,
fears and doubts and boost your energy for an immense leap in
happiness and vitality Repattern your subconscious mind for a new
level of goal achievement Reprogram your brain and body for optimal
health Access your Transpersonal Self to realise who you really are
and your amazing potential If you are ready to create the life you
want, then reading this book may be the most timely and important
decision you make. Includes Brain-Mind-Body Optimisation MP3
Downloads
Places the Swiss composer Schoeck, master of a late-Romantic style
both sensuous and stringent, in context and gives insight into his
increasingly popular musical works. The work of the late-Romantic
Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has in recent years
enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with piano accompaniment
are now all on CD, as are his orchestral song cycles and five of
his eight stage works. Yet despite an impressive discography
featuring names such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lucia Popp and
Ian Bostridge, no biographical study of Schoeck has ever been
available in English. Chris Walton, authorof Richard Wagner in
Zurich: The Muse of Place, charts the turbulent course of Schoeck's
life and career with care and candor, from a rampant youth to
midlife monogamy and an old age ravaged by fears of neglect. He
tracesSchoeck's relationships to musicians such as Max Reger,
Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, and Igor
Stravinsky, and to writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and James
Joyce. New light is also shed on Schoeck's uneasy relationship with
Nazi Germany and its culmination, for him, in public humiliation
and private catastrophe. As an accompanist, Schoeck was an
arch-Romantic master of rubato; as a conductor, he was a fervent
champion of the new; and in his compositions, he moved from
late-Romanticism through a modernist vortex to emerge in full
mastery of an individual musical language both sensuous and
stringent. In this thorough new biography, Waltonplaces Schoeck the
man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. Chris
Walton is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch
in South Africa and Managing Director of the Orchestre Symphonique
Bienne in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max
Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary
and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the
English-speaking world.
Presents case studies of "inspiration" in five composers -- Wagner,
Mahler, Furtwängler, R. Strauss, and Berg -- examining how the
supposedly extrarational world of creative inspiration intersects
with the highly rational world ofmoney and politics. Lies and
Epiphanies offers case studies of "inspiration" in five composers
-- Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard
Strauss, and Alban Berg. Their own tales of their epiphanies played
a determining role in the reception history of their works: the
finale of Mahler's Second Symphony was supposedly born of a
"lightning bolt" of inspiration at the funeral of Hans von Bülow,
while Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was purportedly his direct
response to the tragic early death of Alma Mahler's daughter. Chris
Walton looks behind these tales to explore instead the composer's
dual role as author and self-commentator, laying bare the fissures
and inconsistencieswithin these artists' testimonies and revealing
how the putatively extrarational world of creative inspiration
intersects with the highly rational world of money and politics. As
Walton points out, the composer often imposes on the audience an
interpretation of a work and its genesis that is as superficial as
the score itself is not. This study seeks to show why. Chris Walton
teaches music history at the Basel University of Music in
Switzerland.He is the author of Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works
(University of Rochester Press, 2009) and Richard Wagner's Zurich:
The Muse of Place (Camden House, 2007).
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