Bringing Opera to Life

Bringing Opera to Life PDF Author: Boris Goldovsky
Publisher: New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts
ISBN:
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description

Bringing Opera to Life

Bringing Opera to Life PDF Author: Boris Goldovsky
Publisher: New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts
ISBN:
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description


Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life

Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life PDF Author: Jane W. Davidson
Publisher: Durham Modern Languages
ISBN: 9780907310655
Category : DVD-Video discs
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description


Bringing Soprano Arias to Life

Bringing Soprano Arias to Life PDF Author: Boris Goldovsky
Publisher: Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810823648
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
New in Paperback! This book supplies a soprano with nearly everything she may need to perform the operatic arias discussed. The 28 arias included are chosen from among those that are more popular and most widely studied and performed. There are descriptions of stage settings, with costume sketches by famed theatrical designer Leo Van Witsen. The heart of each discussion is a detailed descriptions of the sections of the area. While the scenic design may change from one production to another, the suggestions given for dramatic motivations, character building, and stage movement can be readily adapted for use in any theatrical environment. Although it is not intended that these arias be acted out on the concert stage, much of the information_the dramatic analysis, discussions of vocal and musical aspects, matters of style and tradition, and translations of the texts_should be profitable for students of singing and stage direction, as well as professional opera singers, no matter how or where the arias are performed. Paperback edition available June 2001. Cloth edition previously published in 1990.

In Search of Opera

In Search of Opera PDF Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400866731
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being. Weaving between opera's "facts of life" and a series of works including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

Divas and Scholars

Divas and Scholars PDF Author: Philip Gossett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226304884
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 699

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Book Description
Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett’s personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas. Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrall both aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it—in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.

Opera

Opera PDF Author: Guy A. Marco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113557801X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 655

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Book Description
Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Unsettling Opera

Unsettling Opera PDF Author: David J. Levin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226475255
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
What happens when operas that are comfortably ensconced in the canon are thoroughly rethought and radically recast on stage? What does a staging do to our understanding of an opera, and of opera generally? While a stage production can disrupt a work that was thought to be established, David J. Levin here argues that the genre of opera is itself unsettled, and that the performance of operas, at its best, clarifies this condition by bringing opera’s restlessness and volatility to life. Unsettling Opera explores a variety of fields, considering questions of operatic textuality, dramaturgical practice, and performance theory. Levin opens with a brief history of opera production, opera studies, and dramatic composition, and goes on to consider in detail various productions of the works of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Ultimately, the book seeks to initiate a dialogue between scholars of music, literature, and performance by addressing questions raised in each field in a manner that influences them all.

Opera As Opera

Opera As Opera PDF Author: Conrad L. Osborne
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999436608
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


From the Score to the Stage

From the Score to the Stage PDF Author: Evan Baker (Opera historian)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226035086
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life--by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, From the Score to the Stage follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people--composers, librettists, designers, and technicians--as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, From the Score to the Stage is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.

History is Our Mother: Three Libretti

History is Our Mother: Three Libretti PDF Author: Alice Goodman
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681370654
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The first appearance of Alice Goodman's two internationally-renowned and controversial libretti, alongside one of her masterful translations. An NYRB Classics Original Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer played a crucial role in bringing opera back to life as a contemporary art form, and they have been popular—and, in the case of Klinghoffer, highly controversial—ever since they were first staged by the director Peter Sellars in the eighties and nineties. Both operas were conceived from the start as collaborations between composer and writer, and their power is due as much to the dazzlingly constructed and deeply felt libretti of the poet Alice Goodman as they are to John Adams’s music. Nixon in China is a story, at once heroic, comic, and unnerving, of men and women making history and of their different conceptions of what history is and what it means to makes it. Klinghoffer, by contrast, has at its center the tragedy of an innocent man condemned at the cost of his life to play a part in history. History Is Our Mother, which takes its title from a line sung by the title character in Nixon in China, brings Goodman’s two libretti together for the first time in book form. Included alongside Goodman’s no less inspired translation of Emanuel Schikaneder’s famous libretto to The Magic Flute, these vivid dramas of character and searching meditations on fate are here revealed as among the most original, ambitious, and accomplished poetic achievements of our time.