The Essence of Opera PDF Download

Author: Ulrich Weisstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393004984
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The process of operatic creation revealed in original writings by librettists and composers from 1600 to the present.

Author: Ulrich Weisstein
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 904202111X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Ulrich Weisstein, an international authority in the fields of comparative literature and comparative arts, has been a pioneer paving the way for present-day intermedia studies. Among his broad intermedial interests opera has always held a central place. For the first time this volume makes available his major contributions to opera criticism in compact form, thus meeting a serious scholarly demand. The necessarily stringent selection of essays from Professor Weisstein's large output on opera, reflecting fifty years of involvement with the genre, is primarily governed by the wish to present texts that are representative of their author's work and, at the same time, are unlikely to be readily available through other channels. The fourteen essays collected are arranged in chronological order, some of them showing Ulrich Weisstein as an initiator of librettology, others tracing adaptive processes extending from textual sources to final operas, or investigating writer/composer collaborations. Further topics are satirical reflections on operatic activities in early-eighteenth-century Italy and practices of opera censorship, artist operas or definitions of romantic and epic opera. The essays are written in an accessible, essentially non-technical language and are expected to make both a profitable and a pleasurable reading for literary scholars as well as musicologists and general art lovers.

Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

Author: Frederick William Sternfeld
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198165736
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
F. W. Sternfeld examines the role of poets and composers in establishing the new genre of opera in northern Italy around 1600. He discusses the problems of sung drama, particularly the required happy ending and its foil, the lament, and highlights the enduring appeal, from Poliziano through toMonteverdi, to Stravinsky, of the story of Orpheus the divine singer.

Author: Hervé Lacombe
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520217195
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A lively history of French opera in its cultural and historical context by one of France's leading musicologists.

Author: Richard Dellamora
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231109451
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In this significant collection of original essays, preeminent literary and cultural critics, musicologists, and queer theorists delve into the way opera shapes national character through its representations of gender, sexuality, and class. The book includes essays on the works of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and others and examines the impact of such modern phenomena as AIDS. 10 photos. 15 music examples.

Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: Applewood Books
ISBN: 1557091323
Category : Poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
During the Civil War, from 1862-1865, Walt Whitman spent much of his time with wounded soldiers, both in the field and in the hospitals. The 40 notebooks he filled became the basis for the extraordinary diary of a medic in the Civil War.

Author: David Charlton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825895
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
This 2003 Companion is a fascinating and accessible exploration of the world of grand opera. Through this volume a team of scholars and writers on opera examine those important Romantic operas which embraced the Shakespearean sweep of tragedy, history, love in time of conflict, and the struggle for national self-determination. Rival nations, rival religions and violent resolutions are common elements, with various social or political groups represented in the form of operatic choruses. The book traces the origins and development of a style created during an increasingly technical age, which exploited the world-renowned skills of Parisian stage-designers, artists, and dancers as well as singers. It analyses in detail the grand operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy, discusses grand opera in Russia and Germany, and also in the Czech lands, Italy, Britain and the Americas. The volume also includes an essay by the renowned opera director David Pountney.

Author: Rachel Cowgill
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843835673
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Opera, that most extravagant of the performing arts, is infused with the contexts of power-brokering and cultural display in which it was conceived and experienced. For individual operas such contexts have shifted over time and new meanings emerged, often quite remote from those intended by the original collaborators; but tracing this ideological dimension in a work's creation and reception enables us to understand its cultural and political role more clearly - sometimes conflicting with its status as art and sometimes enhancing it. This collection is a Festschrift in honour of Julian Rushton, one of the most distinguished opera scholars of his generation and highly regarded for his innovative studies of Gluck, Mozart and Berlioz, among many others. Colleagues, associates and former students pay tribute to his work with essays highlighting the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries. Three broad themes are opened up from a variety of approaches: nationalism, cosmopolitanism and national opera; opera, class and the politics of enlightenment; and opera and otherness. British opera is represented by studies of Grabu, Purcell, Dibdin, Holst, Stanford and Britten, but the collection sustains a truly European perspective rounded out with essays on French opera funding, Bizet, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Puccini, Janacek, Nielsen, Rimsky-Korsakov and Schreker. Several works receive some of their first extended discussion in English. RACHEL COWGILL is Professor of Musicology at Liverpool Hope University. DAVID COOPER is Professor of Music and Technology at the University of Leeds. CLIVE BROWN is Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds. Contributors: MARY K. HUNTER, CLIVE BROWN, PETER FRANKLIN, RALPH LOCKE, DOMINGOS DE MASCARENHAS, DAVID CHARLTON, KATHARINE ELLIS, BRYAN WHITE, PETER HOLMAN, RACHEL COWGILL, ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN, DAVID COOPER, RICHARD GREENE, J.P.E. HARPER-SCOTT, DANIEL GRIMLEY, STEPHEN MUIR, JOHN TYRRELL.

Author: Ruth Katz
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412838498
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In this cultural history, Ruth Katz conceives of opera as a laboratory dedicated to exploration of the powers hidden in the interaction between words and music. Opera combines not only music and libretto, but the sensuality, acting out, and lyricism that characterize the popular culture of the Italians. The Powers of Music is thus a contribution to cultural studies, providing unique insight into the social meaning of opera in Italy. According to Katz, opera's origins in Renaissance Italy can be traced to numerous characteristics of life at that time. Among them are: the belief of the Humanists that the magical properties of music could be harnessed; the transition from polyphony to monody that gave musical expression to individualism; the melodramatic propensity of Italian culture reflected in its literary and theatrical arts; and the salons of Florentine aristocrats, scientists, and artists whose agenda included the challenge to rediscover how the ancient Greeks succeeded in heightening the rhetorical power of words by allying them with music. Katz discusses each of these factors in detail. In her new introduction, Katz reconsiders her original work by discussing three topics. The first has to do with the perception that there has been a major change in the academic climate for this kind of analysis. The second relates to her concern with the eighteenth-century expansion of the Florentine comparison of the attributes of the arts, from which music emerges as the purest of all, for being freest of external reference. Third, she reconsiders her initial impression that opera was on the wane. The Powers of Music is an intriguing study that will be of interest to sociologists, cultural historians, and scholars of communication and popular culture.