Essays on Handel and Italian Opera

Essays on Handel and Italian Opera PDF Author: Reinhard Strohm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521088350
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition.

Essays on Handel and Italian Opera

Essays on Handel and Italian Opera PDF Author: Reinhard Strohm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521088350
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition.

A Poetics of Handel's Operas

A Poetics of Handel's Operas PDF Author: Nathan Link
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197651348
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
"A Poetics of Handel's Operas investigates the rich representational fabric of Handel's stories, drawing upon musicology, narratology, drama, and film in offering a study with appeal to scholars, producers and performers, opera afficionados, and anyone fascinated by storytelling. In most storytelling genres, we often distinguish between the story, on the one hand, and the way that story is represented, on the other, without a second thought. We know that a character in a film hears neither her own voice-over nor the ambient music that accompanies it, and that she does not really build a house from the ground up in the three minutes spanned by the cinematic montage that depict its construction. In opera, however, many commentators to this day characterize the medium as "unrealistic," since we know, for example, that people in the real world do not sing to each other, nor does orchestral music accompany their utterances. This said, the vocal and orchestral music, while not literally present in the world of the story surely have a great deal to tell us about the opera's story and its characters, and if we distinguish the performance we see and hear on the stage and in the orchestra pit from the story represented, we enable ourselves to construct stories that are no less coherent than those conveyed by other media. By avoiding conflation of the story and its representation, we enable ourselves to engage more meaningfully with the significance of these and many other unique aspects of operatic storytelling"--

Singers of Italian Opera

Singers of Italian Opera PDF Author: John Rosselli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly $5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Rosselli also examines the sexist prejudices against the castrati of the eighteenth century and against women singers. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdote, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain PDF Author: Thomas McGeary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139619470
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.

Opera and Sovereignty

Opera and Sovereignty PDF Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226044548
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period’s social and political upheavals. Taking an anthropological approach to European music that’s as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera’s shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere. In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today. Ambitiously interdisciplinary, Opera and Sovereignty will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.

"Opera Remade, 1700?750 "

Author: Charles Dill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351555723
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances, who the people-composers and performers-were who made opera possible. The essays for this volume capture the principal themes of current research: the "idea" of opera, opera criticism, the people of opera, and the emerging technologies of opera.

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera PDF Author: Anthony R. DelDonna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521873584
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The perfect accompaniment to courses on eighteenth-century opera for both students and teachers, this Companion is a definitive reference resource.

Music and Theatre

Music and Theatre PDF Author: Nigel Fortune
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521619288
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.

The Operas of Leonardo Vinci, Napoletano

The Operas of Leonardo Vinci, Napoletano PDF Author: Kurt Sven Markstrom
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9781576470947
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Vinci produced a string of operas during a brief career of little more than a decade. He died mysteriously. He was hailed by connoisseurs of the later 18th century as one of the originators of the classical style.

How to Write: Successful Essays, Dissertations, and Exams

How to Write: Successful Essays, Dissertations, and Exams PDF Author: Chris Mounsey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199670749
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Taking you step-by-step through how to research, structure, and write essays, this invaluable book provides all the help you need ... [publisher's note]