The Complete Opera Book PDF Download

Author: Léonard A. Rosmarin
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042006942
Category : Libretto
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
While the devotees of opera can be fanatical in their enthusiasm, its detractors will dismiss lyric theatre as an impossible hybrid. Literature and music undermine one another, they maintain. Their concept for the genre is more often than not motivated by the supposedly mediocre quality of the librettos or scripts to which the works are set.

Author: Gustave Kobbé
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

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Book Description

Author: Michael Halliwell
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042016347
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James offers the first full-length study of the theory and practice of the adaptation of fiction into opera: the transference of a work from one medium to another - metaphrasis - is its point of departure. Starting with a survey of the current thinking regarding the nexus between words and music with specific reference to operatic adaptation of existing literary works, it traces the four-hundred-year history of opera, demonstrating that the novel has become increasingly attractive to librettists and composers as an operatic source. As the resources of modern music theatre have increased in sophistication, so too have the possibilities for an expanded engagement with complex fictional works. The intricate relationship between fictional and musical narrative is examined: the proposition that the orchestra assumes much of the function of the narrator in fiction is explored. The second section is a detailed examination of eight operatic works based on Henry James's fiction. It is opera's unique capability to present the intense emotional and psychological situations central to James's fiction as well as the ability to engage with his synthesis of melodrama and psychological ambiguity which makes James's work peculiarly amenable to operatic adaptation. Composers who have used James as a source include Douglas Moore, Benjamin Britten, Thomas Pasatieri, Donald Hollier, Thea Musgrave, Philip Hagemann and Dominick Argento. The operas discussed represent a contemporary critical and often self-conscious engagement with the art form itself as well as illustrating current adaptive strategies, and suggest ways in which new operatic paths may be forged. This volume is of relevance to students and scholars of English literature and opera as well as readers who take an interest in intermedial research and the question of adaptation in general.

Author: Jerome Winter
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178316946X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

Author: David McKay Powell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-seven operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera’s complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell’s Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. With close attention to Cather’s fiction and criticism, Powell posits that at the heart of both her work and the operatic corpus dwells an innate tension between high artistic ideals and popular acceptance, often figured as a clash between compositional integrity and raw, personal emotion. Considering her connection to opera in both historical and intertextual terms, Cather and Opera investigates what operatic references mean in Cather’s writing, along with what the opera represented to her throughout her life.

Author: Samuel Holland-Rous
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1434479196
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
In depth descriptions of various operas with scene by scene, aria by aria accounts.

Author: David G. Hartwell
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0765306174
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 943

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Book Description
The best-ever anthology of one of science fiction's most vigorous subgenres

Author: Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465506187
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description

Author: Steven Paul Scher
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042017528
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
The present volume meets a frequently expressed demand as it is the first collection of all the relevant essays and articles which Steven Paul Scher has written on Literature and Music over a period of almost forty years in the field of Word and Music Studies. Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, is one of the founding fathers of Word and Music Studies and a leading authority in what is in the meantime a well-established intermedial field. He has published very widely in a variety of journals and collections of essays, which until now have not always been easy to lay one's hands on. His work covers a wide range of subjects and comprises theoretical, methodological and historical studies, which include discussions of Ferruccio Busoni, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Judith Weir, the Talking Heads and many others and which pay special attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism. The range and depth of these studies have made him the 'mastermind' of Word and Music Studies who has defined the basic aims and objectives of the discipline. This volume is of interest to literary scholars and musicologists as well as comparatists and all those concerned about the rapidly expanding field of Intermedia Studies.

Author: Henry Edward Krehbiel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description