Author: Julius MattfeldPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Book Description
A Hundred Years of Grand Opera in New York, 1825-1925
Author: Julius MattfeldPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Book Description
Highbrow/Lowbrow
Author: Lawrence W. LevinePublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674255291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.
Opera for the People
Author: Katherine K. PrestonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199371660
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 649
Book Description
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.
Charles Amable Battaille
Author: James Richard JoinerPublisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810835337
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Joiner provides the invaluable historical context of early voice study, and includes musical examples and original drawings from Charles Amable Battaille's (1822-1872) dissections, which were included in his original volumes. No other studies or translations of Battaille's work exist in English, making this book an essential addition to the literature of vocal science and vocal pedagogy; it will serve as a valuable resource to singing teachers, students, and scholars in the field.
Music & Letters
Author: Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association with the Quarterly Journal
Author: New York State Historical AssociationPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : New York (State)
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
Lorenzo Da Ponte
Author: Sheila HodgesPublisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299178730
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
Three of the greatest operas ever written—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—join the exquisite music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte’s own long life (1749–1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet, and librettist of genius who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became professor of Italian at Columbia University—wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III’s London to New York City.
Harvard Dictionary of Music
Author: Willi ApelPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674375017
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 968
Book Description
Contains nearly 1000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects.
The Dramatic Index for ...
Author: Frederick Winthrop FaxonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Issues for 1912-16, 1919- accompanied by an appendix: The Dramatic books and plays (in English) (title varies slightly) This bibliography was incorporated into the main list in 1917-18.
Author: