Author: April FitzLyonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Librettists
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
The Libertine Librettist
Author: April FitzLyonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Librettists
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
The Last Troubadours
Author: Deirdre O'GradyPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429774362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
First published in 1991. At once poet, dramatist, adaptor and translator, the operatic librettist in turn expresses and mocks social convention. Deirdre O'Grady's study of the Italian operatic librettist identifies opera as a mirror of literary climates, popular taste and political aspirations. The Last Troubadours traces the history of the Italian libretto from its courtly origin in the 16th century, through the crisis of the aristocracy and the 19th-century struggle for national unity, to the birth of social realism. Fundamental elements of Italian opera - heroic valour, cunning servants, revolutionary ardour and romantic tenderness - are considered in their historical and cultural context. Also discussed are famous lyrical and musical collaborations - of Da Ponte and Mozart, Solera and Verdi, Romani and Bellini, and Boito and Verdi.
William Alwyn
Author: John C. DresslerPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113666002X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
William Alwyn: A Research and Information Guide is a catalogue, discography and annotated bibliography of the nearly 500 works of this twentieth-century British composer. It will be invaluable to twentieth-century British composer researchers and aficionados, music history courses, and film music courses.
William Hickling Prescott
Author: C. Harvey GardinerPublisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292735154
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
This biography of a distinguished historian and man of letters is the first study of William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) to be written by a historian who has worked with the very themes explored by Prescott. And it is the first to treat him not only as creative historian but also as family man, as traveler and clubman, as investor and humanitarian, and as private citizen with strong political preferences. Prescott the socialite and Prescott the introvert writer emerge in the round as the magnificent amateur who helped establish canons that have enriched American historical scholarship ever since. Blending history and literature, his multivolume works won Prescott the first significant international reputation to be accorded to an American historian. Working despite persistent obstacles of health and against a penchant for society and leisure that was always part of his personality, Prescott came to be considered the finest interpreter of the Hispanic world produced by the Anglo-Saxon world. His Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru were pronounced classics. C. Harvey Gardiner takes the reader back to the nineteenth century in style and in subject to present William Hickling Prescott, gentleman and scholar, firmly fixed in relationship to his community and his times. But Gardiner's Victorian stance and respect for nineteenth-century historiography do not prevent his presenting Prescott as a whole man, viewed in retrospect, stripped of myth, and evaluated for moderns.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant
Author: William Cullen BryantPublisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 082328722X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 583
Book Description
This is the only collection ever made of Bryant's letters, two-thirds of which have never before been printed. Their publication was foreseen by the late Allan Nevin as "one of the most important and stimulating enterprises contributory to the enrichment of the nation's cultural and political life that is now within range of individual and group effort. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was America's earliest national poet. His immediate followers—Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman—unquestionably began their distinguished careers in imitation of his verses. But Bryant was even more influential in his long career as a political journalist, and in his encouragement of American art, from his lectures at the National Academy of Design in 1828 to his evocation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Between the appearance of his first major poem, "Thanatopsis," in 1817, and his death sixty-one years later at the age of eight-three, Bryant knew and corresponded with an extraordinary number of eminent men and women. More than 2,100 of his know letters have already been recovered for the present edition. When William Cullen Bryant signed the first of 314 letters in the present volume, in 1809, he was a frail and shy farm boy of fourteen who had nonetheless already won some fame as the satirist of Thomas Jefferson. When he wrote the last, in 1836, he had become the chief poet of his country, the editor of its principal liberal newspaper, and the friend and collaborator of its leading artists and writers. His collected poems, previously published at New York, Boston, and London, were going into their third edition. His incisive editorials in the New York Evening Post were affecting the decisions of Andrew Jackson's administration. His poetic themes were beginning to find expression in the landscape paintings of Robert Weir, Asher Durand, and Thomas Cole. The early letters gathered here in chronological order give a unique picture of Cullen Bryant's youth and young manhood: his discipline in the classics preparatory to an all-too-brief college tenure; his legal study and subsequent law practice; the experiments with romantic versification which culminated in his poetic masterpieces, and those with the opposite sex which led to his courtship and marriage; his eager interest in the politics of the Madison and Monroe Presidencies, and his subsequent activities as a local politician and polemicist in western Massachusetts; his apprenticeship as magazine editor and literary critic in New York City, from which his later eminence as journalist was the natural evolution; the lectures on poetry and mythology which foreshadowed a long career as occasional orator; the collaboration in writing The Talisman, The American Landscape, and Tales of Glauber-Spa, and in forming the National Academy of Design, and the Sketch Club, which brought him intimacy with writers, artists, and publishers; his first trip to the Aemrican West, and his first long visit to Europe, during which he began the practice of writing letters to his newspaper which, throughout nearly half a century, proved him a perceptive interpreter of the distant scene to his contemporaries. Here, in essence, is the first volume of the autobiography of one whom Abraham Lincoln remarked after his first visit to New York City in 1860, "It was worth the journey to the East merely to see such a man." And John Bigelow, who of Bryant's many eulogists knew him best, said in 1878 of his longtime friend and business partner, "There was no eminent American upon whom the judgment of his countrymen would be more immediate and unanimous. The broad simple outline of his character and career had become universally familiar, like a mountain or a sea."
Democracy at the Opera
Author: Karen AhlquistPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252022722
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Was there opera - and just what was it like - in New York City before the advent of the Metropolitan Opera Company? In exploring these questions, Karen Ahlquist describes the social, cultural, economic, and esthetic factors that led to the assimilation of Italian opera - a complex, expensive genre of elitist reputation - into New York's business oriented community, with its English cultural heritage and sacred republican traditions. In her lively description of opera as few today can imagine it, Ahlquist considers Jacksonian-era efforts to create a polite social setting, the influence of a socially based clash between respectability and broad public access, and the role of music in shaping, not just reflecting, social and cultural life.
Casanova
Author: Laurence BergreenPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476716498
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
Book Description
"The remarkable story of Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), an impoverished abandoned boy who became the notorious libertine, famous writer, and correspondent with figures such as Voltaire, Louis XV, and Catherine the Great in decadent 18th-century Europe."--Provided by publisher.
The Theatre of Don Juan
Author: Oscar MandelPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803281370
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 748
Book Description
"Many good things are provided for our instruction and delight in this handsome volume. Chief among them perhaps, and most keenly wanted in a collection of this sort . . . are sanity and wit."?The Romanic Review "A most interesting literary history of the Don Juan theme with the plays or works themselves serving as illustrations. Professor Mandel's general introduction and his shorter introductions and commentaries throughout the book are solid, wise, and engaging."?Robert E. Taylor, Renaissance News "This anthology is exhaustive and informative, expertly translated, and, by virtue of its subject, damned exciting."?Quarterly Journal of Speech "[The translations] are lively and . . . quite faithful to the originals. . . . The long introduction could well stand alone: fruitful in original observations on the nature of Don Juan, spirited, argu-mentative, and quite personal."?Armand F. Singer, Hispania The eternal Don Juan, the creation more than 350 years ago of a monk and dramatist known as Tirso de Molina, has appeared on the boards as a thinker and fool, hero and villain, but never as anything less than a great lover. Oscar Mandel's Theatre of Don Juan presents different aspects of the Don's spectacular progress through a half-dozen countries, epochs, and intellectual climates. Here are full-length plays by Molina, Moli_re, Shadwell, Da Ponte, Grabbe, Moncrieff, Zorrilla, and Rostand; excerpts from plays by Shaw, Montherlant, and Frisch; plus a dozen critical and interpretative essays. In his introduction, Mandel examines the legend of Don Juan.
Lorenzo Da Ponte
Author: April FitzlyonPublisher: Alma Books
ISBN: 0714544876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
This is the revised edition of April FitzLyon's celebrated biography of Mozart's librettist, who provided the brilliant, witty texts for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte. Born a Jew in the Republic of Venice, Da Ponte became a Christian before involving himself in political and amorous intrigue and having to flee, like his friend Casanova, to Vienna, pursued by both the Inquisition and jealous husbands. As court poet to Joseph II he succeeded Metastasio and worked with many composers, until his escapades forced him to move on to London, where he managed the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. After a series of financial disasters, he moved to New York, where he worked several jobs before becoming a professor at Columbia. He helped to introduce Italian opera to the USA and in old age wrote his notoriously unreliable memoirs.This fascinating portrait provides a colourful picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in four capitals, combining musical and literary history with an account of the social life of the period.
Operas in English
Author: Margaret Ross GriffelPublisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810883252
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1015
Book Description
Although many opera dictionaries and encyclopedias are available, very few are devoted exclusively to operas in a single language. In this revised and expanded edition of Operas in English: A Dictionary, Margaret Ross Griffel brings up to date her original work on operas written specifically to an English text (including works both originally prepared in English, as well as English translations). Since its original publication in 1999, Griffel has added nearly 800 entries to the 4,300 from the original volume, covering the world of opera in the English language from 1634 through 2011. Listed alphabetically by letter, each opera entry includes alternative titles, if any; a full, descriptive title; the number of acts; the composer’s name; the librettist’s name, the original language of the libretto, and the original source of the text, with the source title; the date, place, and cast of the first performance; the date of composition, if it occurred substantially earlier than the premiere date; similar information for the first U.S. (including colonial) and British (i.e., in England, Scotland, or Wales) performances, where applicable; a brief plot summary; the main characters (names and vocal ranges, where known); some of the especially noteworthy numbers cited by name; comments on special musical problems, techniques, or other significant aspects; and other settings of the text, including non-English ones, and/or other operas involving the same story or characters (cross references are indicated by asterisks). Entries also include such information as first and critical editions of the score and libretto; a bibliography, ranging from scholarly studies to more informal journal articles and reviews; a discography; and information on video recordings. Griffel also includes four appendixes, a selective bibliography, and two indexes. The first appendix lists composers, their places and years of birth and death, and their operas included in the text as entries; the second does the same for librettists; the third records authors whose works inspired or were adapted for the librettos; and the fourth comprises a chronological listing of the A–Z entries, including as well as the date of first performance, the city of the premiere, the short title of the opera, and the composer. Griffel also include a main character index and an index of singers, conductors, producers, and other key figures.