Author: Patricia HowardPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521296649
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
This book explores all aspects of Gluck's historically important opera Orfeo.
C. W. Von Gluck: Orfeo
Author: Patricia HowardPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521296649
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
This book explores all aspects of Gluck's historically important opera Orfeo.
Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780
Author: Daniel HeartzPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393037128
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 844
Book Description
Historians have long tried to place the music of Haydn and Mozart in the lineage of German Lutheran music. In this book, Daniel Heartz shows that the first Viennese school grew from a Catholic inheritance in Italian music and from local tradition, with an admixture of French currents. The generation of composers led by Haydn no longer trained in Italy. By the time young Mozart joined the ranks of the Viennese school, its accomplishments towered above all others of the time. The author's approach can be compared to viewing a majestic mountain range in its totality: the highest peaks take on even greater majesty when seen in their natural context of foothills and lesser peaks. This is how Haydn and Mozart were viewed by their contemporaries, whose world of perception Heartz recreates, using, among other things, the visual art of the period. His focus is on music as a part of cultural history at a particular time and place. Stylistic terms and a priori periods matter less to him than the common denominators of geography, culture, and political history. Book jacket.
Liszt and the Symphonic Poem
Author: Joanne CormacPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181410
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
A fresh evaluation of Liszt's symphonic poems, based on contextual, philosophical and musical evidence.
Under the Spell of Orpheus
Author: Judith E. BernstockPublisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809316595
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
This comprehensive view of the Orpheus myth in modern art focuses on an extremely rich artistic symbol and cuts through all the clichés to explore truly significant problems of meaning. The author takes a new approach to the iconography of major modern artists by incorporating psychological and literary analysis, as well as biography. The three parts of the book explore the ways in which artists have identified with different aspects of the often paradoxical Orpheus myth. The first deals with artists such as Paul Klee, Carl Milles, and Barbara Hepworth. In the second, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Isamu Noguchi are discussed. Artists examined in the final part include Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Ethel Schwabacher, and Cy Twombly. The author documents her argument with more than sixty illustrations.
“Music’s Obedient Daughter”
Author: Sabine LichtensteinPublisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401210551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Book Description
A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.
Engaging Haydn
Author: Mary Kathleen HunterPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107015146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 363
Book Description
Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation: this book explores fresh approaches to his music and the cultural forces affecting it.
Reading Critics Reading
Author: Roger ParkerPublisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198166979
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
This book is among the first to examine French opera and ballet criticism during the first half of the nineteenth century both as a historical and a literary phenomenon. It thus provides a new and badly needed perspective for scholars and other commentators who have often been willing to treat the journalistic responses to such musical genres chiefly as a simple source of factual information. The essays, taken from a conference in Oxford in 1996, explore the kinds of problem encountered and the types of methodology that might be employed in trying to interpret these critical responses; they throw light on such aspects as the cultural attitudes underlying the writers' rhetoric, the aesthetic stances and ideological agendas at play, and how modes of production influenced content.
The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt
Author: Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810883309
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Book Description
In Dramaturgical Leaves: Essays about Musical Works for the Stage and Queries about the Stage, Its Composers and Performers, the third volume in Janita R. Hall-Swadley’s The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, Liszt heralds his admiration for early nineteenth-century opera and musical stage works. He honors Gluck, the musical prophet, as the cultivator of dramatic truth in the Romantic opera Orpheus, expounds on Beethoven’s harmonic inventions and innovative treatment of form in Fidelio, and argues for the latter’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont as the epitome of music organicism, a complete unity of words and tone. He also comments on Weber’s Euryanthe as offering the most progressive musical characterizations and declamation—even more so than his popular work Der Freischütz—and on how both works prefigure Wagner’s music dramas; awards Mendelssohn, whose genius Liszt ranks only slightly less than Beethoven’s, top honors for creating in Midsummer’s Night Dream the highest standards of music poetry; suggests how Scribe and Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil paints a mental image of art’s eternal flames, where poet and musician share equal space in the development of music tragedy; reveals how the poetic deficiencies in the libretto to Schubert’s Alfonso and Estrella are too easily overlooked because of the music’s melodic and lyrical supremacy; and offers in contrast Auber’s Mute from Portici, a remarkable text by many historically picturesque musical motives that are universal and nationalistic at the same time. Finally Liszt offers an early gender study in music in his essay about Bellini’s Montague and Capulet (as well as its impact on nineteenth-century audiences), a look at Boieldieu’s White Lady as a sublime depiction of literary music, and Donizetti’s Favorite as colored with a special type of imagery, a laterna magica, in Liszt’s hand. The beloved soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia receives special attention in an essay devoted entirely to her, and Liszt proffers a critique of entr’acte music as a pointless tradition that dethrones music and insults the artist and composer by making music a “palate cleanser.” This volume includes a detailed discussion about what it meant to be patronized by Liszt and how his support—financial, literary, and musical—helped shape many a music career. It also offers commentary on how gender in opera was sometimes obscured not only for dramatic interest but also as part of the process of outlining a nation’s identity,as well as a thorough study of Liszt’s concepts of Gestalt theory, the Archetype, and his musical Weltanschauung (his musical "world view"), all revealing his contribution to 19th-century music philosophy as it relates to opera. Finally, a historical review of entr’acte music is presented—how it began and how it developed—to clarify Liszt’s stance against it, making this volume a necessary read for music historians, serious musicians, and music connoisseurs alike.
Opera From the Greek
Author: Michael EwansPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351555766
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. These range from Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, drawn from Homer's Odyssey, to Mark-Antony Turnage's Greek, based on Sophocles's Oedipus the King. Choices have been based on an understanding that the relationship between each of the operas and their Greek source texts raise significant issues, involving an examination of the process by which the librettist creates a new text for the opera, and the crucial insights into the nature of the drama that are bestowed by the composer's musical setting. Ewans examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.
Igor Stravinsky, the Rake's Progress
Author: Paul GriffithsPublisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521245906
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.