Music-Genres & Styles-Opera

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde occupies a singular position in the history of Western culture. What Nietzsche called the 'sweet and terrible infinity' of its basic nexus of longing and death has fascinated audiences since its first performance in 1865. At the same time, its...

Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is widely acknowledged as one of the most original musical theater works of the twentieth century. This clear and concise guide, the first ever written on the work, describes the plot, the music and the staging in close detail and provides...

Monteverdi's Unruly Women examines the composer's madrigals and music dramas for what they can tell us about the musical and cultural world of singing and the voice in early modern Italy. Monteverdi's music demanded trained, female voices to make dramatic and expressive statements. At...

How did "voice" become a metaphor for selfhood in the Western imagination? The Lyric Myth of Voice situates the emergence of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity in late eighteenth-century Italy, where long-standing political anxieties and new notions of cultural enlightenment collided in...

The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the...

Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students...

Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers' revisions, singers' improvisations, and stage directors' re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some...

An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the...

The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global...

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics--an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its...

Opera has been around ever since the late 16th century, and it is still going strong in the sense that operas are performed around the world at present, and known by infinitely more persons than just those who attend performances. On the other hand,...

Based on Dr. Lang's experience as music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, this book preserves the immediate reactions of a working reviewer, his on-the-spot responses to the actual experience of theatrical productions, spanning the active repertory from Gluck to the present day....

The Latin American centennial celebrations of independence (ca.1909-1925) constituted a key moment in the consolidation of national symbols and emblems, while also producing a renewed focus on transnational affinities that generated a series of discourses about continental unity. At the same time, a boom...

Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in...

In Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! expert and enthusiast Ian Bradley explores the world of Gilbert and Sullivan over the last four and a half decades, looking at the way this "phenomenon" is passed from generation to generation. Taking as his starting point the expiry...

Opera in the Tropics is an engaging exploration of theater with music in Brazil from the mid 1500s to the early 1820s. Author Rog駻io Budasz delves into the practices of the actors, singers, poets, and composers who created and performed Jesuit moral plays, Spanish...

Emanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812) is known today only as the librettist of Mozart's The Magic Flute, yet he was also the most important theater director of his time, an actor, singer, producer, and a prolific dramatist.Author: Kurt HonolkaISBN-10: 0931340217ISBN-13: 9780931340215Publisher: AmadeusLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/01/2003Pages: 236Format: HardcoverWeight:...

Excerpt from Macbeth: Melodramma in Quattro Parti Norvegia, e, nell'ebbrezza della gloria, sorpreso dalle streghe che fanno sfolgorare ai suoi occhi, qual promessa del de stino, l'immagine della grandezza ch'egli non puo couse guire se non per via d' un delitto. Iustigato dalla moglie,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you...

John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music. Deathridge writes authoritatively on what Wagner did, said,...

Offers fresh perspectives on the function of nationalist thought in the cosmopolitan opera world, with particular emphasis on the idea of "Russianness" in four nineteenth-century operas by Glinka, Serov, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. In the nineteenth century, Russian composers and critics were encouraged to cultivate...

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French cultural life seethed with debates about the proper nature and form of musical expression, particularly in opera. Expressed in a flood of pamphlets, articles, letters and poems as well as in the actual disruption of performances,...

"La Boh鑪e is perhaps Puccini's most nearly perfect opera." -- Hughes, Famous Puccini Operas.It has long been one of the world's most beloved musical works -- an instantly enchanting blend of charm, warmth, gaiety, and pathos, brought to vibrant life by Puccini's sparkling, lighthearted...

Mozart's beloved comic romp, reprinted from a late (C. F. Peters, 1941) edition, which preserves Mozart's autograph manuscript and early translations of the libretto and includes passages that are often cut in other editions.Author: Wolfgang Amadeus MozartISBN-10: 0486237516ISBN-13: 9780486237510Publisher: Dover PublicationsLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1979Pages: 448Format:...

A superb new translation of one of the greatest nineteenth century poems: the libretto to Wagner's Ring cycleThe scale and grandeur of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung has no precedent and no successor. It preoccupied Wagner for much of his adult life and...

(Vocal Score). Paper Edition Italian only.Author: Giacomo PucciniISBN-10: 0634071335ISBN-13: 9780634071331Publisher: RicordiLanguage: EnglishPublished: 08/01/1987Pages: 290Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.65lbsSize: 10.60h x 7.70w x 0.80d

(Opera). Casa Ricordi is the original publisher for the unforgettable Italian operas that have made their mark on musical history and now hold a special place in the hearts of millions of music lovers. Now, for the first time, Ricordi makes their full orchestral...

(Opera). Ricordi is proud to present the first titles in their new series of orchestral scores featuring engaging images (from Casa Ricordi's historical archives) and synopses in Italian, English, French and German. In addition, these scores feature heavier cover and paper stock plus stronger...

In this remarkable book, Collin Cleary defends Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen against the claim that it "distorts" Germanic mythology. Wagner was a serious student of the myths and sagas of Northern Europe, and the Ring is surprisingly faithful to them. Wagner retells...

(Vocal Score). Italian Only Cloth Score.Author: Giuseppe VerdiISBN-10: 0634072641ISBN-13: 9780634072642Publisher: RicordiLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/01/1987Pages: 249Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.80lbsSize: 10.60h x 7.90w x 0.80d

(Vocal Score). Italian only, with an introductory plot synopsis in English.Author: Wolfgang Amadeus MozartISBN-10: 1423432150ISBN-13: 9781423432159Publisher: RicordiLanguage: EnglishPublished: 06/01/2006Pages: 368Format: PaperbackWeight: 2.05lbsSize: 10.60h x 7.80w x 0.90d

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) offers ample reason why the complete score to Strauss's Salome is worthy of study. "It is virtuoso display of the creation of atmospheric colour by instrumental means." There are, of course, other reasons -- it...

(Opera). Ricordi is proud to present the first titles in their new series of orchestral scores featuring engaging images (from Casa Ricordi's historical archives) and synopses in Italian, English, French and German. In addition, these scores feature heavier cover and paper stock plus stronger...

"Muzio was a case apart: you cannot classify her, for in the end you have been so emotionally destroyed by her performance, you did not even know anymore what kind of instrument she had". So spoke Lucrezia Bori, the beloved soprano of the Metropolitan...

This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne...

(Opera). Ricordi is proud to present the first titles in their new series of orchestral scores featuring engaging images (from Casa Ricordi's historical archives) and synopses in Italian, English, French and German. In addition, these scores feature heavier cover and paper stock plus stronger...

When Giacomo Puccini saw Sarah Bernhardt in a production of La Tosca by French playwright Victorien Sardou, he knew immediately that its highly dramatic plot, turning on lust, revenge, and betrayal, was made for opera. When he heard that Verdi was interested in the...

This outstanding volume is a compilation of the most important chapters from two books in which master singers and teachers offer invaluable advice on topics essential to every singer -- from basic vocal training to the ineffable qualities that make a singer great.Twenty-seven concise...

Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Kracauer uses the life and work of...

"Opera A to Z: A Beginner's Guide to Opera" is an overview of the most famous operas and opera characters of all time, one for each letter of the alphabet. The titles are in the original language from Aida to Zauberfl⍥te. Operas by the...

Mozart was commissioned to write La Clemenza di Tito for the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia. Working with libretto by Metastasio, he based the plot on incidents in the life of the Roman emperor Titus and composed...

One of the most influential of all singing guides by one of opera's first international superstars. Famed for her dramatic presence, powerful and flexible voice and great repertoire, Mme. Lehmann offers inspiration and sound advice in every phase of singing, from how to breathe...

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through...

One of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of postwar opera, Christa Ludwig recalls her long and lustrous career singing for two generations of adoring audiences, under the batons of such conductors as Klemperer, Karajan, Solti, and Bernstein, in the great opera houses of the world. Her...

As a commentator on music and music critics, Bernard Shaw was experienced and knowledgeable, strongly opinionated, and, as in all his writing, unsurpassed for brilliance and wit. The reader will find that this commentary on the cycle of four Wagner operas known as The...

Note that the file is only 80 pages long, which means there will be some blank pages in the POD version.Author: Hugh VickersISBN-10: 0312346344ISBN-13: 9780312346348Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PLLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/15/1985Pages: 108Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.32lbsSize: 8.52h x 5.51w x 0.28d

From the New York Times bestselling biographer Anne Edwards comes the irresistible true story of the lives and loves of the great opera diva, Maria Callas.Maria Callas continues to mesmerize us decades after her death, not only because she was indisputably the greatest opera...

In this book, Eugene J. Johnson traces the invention of the opera house, a building type of world wide importance. Italy laid the foundation theater buildings in the West, in architectural spaces invented for the commedia dell'arte in the sixteenth century, and theaters built...

Stephen Cheng's innovative book is the first to combine the best of Western vocal technique and modern psychophysical exercises with ancient Chinese philosophy and breathing practices. His simple but powerful vocal method is widely known for bringing about dramatic improvement in the performance of...

Jerome Hines has interviewed 40 singers, a speech therapist, and a throat specialist to provide this invaluable collection of advice for all singers. This collection includes the commentary of Licia Albanese, Franco Corelli, Placido Domingo, Nicolai Gedda, Marilyn Horne, Sherrill Milnes, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano...