From Garrick to Gluck

From Garrick to Gluck PDF Author: Daniel Heartz
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9781576470817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A collection of 18 essays on musical theatre in the eighteenth century, written between 1967 and 2001

From Garrick to Gluck

From Garrick to Gluck PDF Author: Daniel Heartz
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9781576470817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A collection of 18 essays on musical theatre in the eighteenth century, written between 1967 and 2001

Gluck

Gluck PDF Author: Patricia Howard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351565354
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This volume presents a collection of essays by leading Gluck scholars which highlight the best of recent and classic contributions to Gluck scholarship, many of which are now difficult to access. Tracing Gluck?s life, career and legacy, the essays offer a variety of approaches to the major issues and controversies surrounding the composer and his works and range from the degree to which reform elements are apparent in his early operas to his contribution to changing perceptions of Hellenism. The introduction identifies the major topics investigated and highlights the innovatory nature of many of the approaches, particularly those which address perceptions of the composer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume, which focuses on one of the most fascinating and influential composers of his era, provides an indispensable resource for academics, scholars and libraries.

Musical Theater in Eighteenth-century Parma

Musical Theater in Eighteenth-century Parma PDF Author: Margaret Ruth Butler
Publisher:
ISBN: 1580469019
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should say -- or how? French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian operas that consciously set out to fuse French and Italian elements, Butler explores Traetta's operas and recreations in Parma of operas and ballets by Jean-Philippe Rameau and other French composers. She shows that Parma's brand of entertainment is one in which Traetta's operas occupy points along a continuum representing a long and rich tradition of adaptation and generic play. Such a reading calls into question the very notion of operatic reform, showing the need for a more flexible conception of a volatile moment in opera's history. The book elucidates the complicated circumstances in which entertainments were created that spoke not only to Parma's multicultural audiences but also to an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe. MARGARET R. BUTLER is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Lyric Myth of Voice

The Lyric Myth of Voice PDF Author: Jessica Gabriel Peritz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520380797
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"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 mythical figure of the lyric poet-singer. Drawing on a range of approaches and frameworks from historical musicology to gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, and literary theory, Jessica Gabriel Peritz shows how this ancient yet modern myth of voice attained interpretable form, flesh, and sound. Ultimately, Peritz argues that music and literature together shaped the singing voice into a tool for civilizing modern Italian subjects"--

Painting the Cannon's Roar

Painting the Cannon's Roar PDF Author: Thomas Tolley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351555251
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
From c.1750 to c.1810 the paths of music history and the history of painting converged with lasting consequences. The publication of Newton's Opticks at the start of the eighteenth century gave a 'scientific' basis to the analogy between sight and sound, allowing music and the visual arts to be defined more closely in relation to one another. This was also a period which witnessed the emergence of a larger and increasingly receptive audience for both music and the visual arts - an audience which potentially included all social strata. The development of this growing public and the commercial potential that it signified meant that for the first time it became possible for a contemporary artist to enjoy an international reputation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the career of Joseph Haydn. Although this phenomenon defies conventional modes of study, the book shows how musical pictorialism became a major creative force in popular culture. Haydn, the most popular living cultural personality of the period, proved to be the key figure in advancing the new relationship. The connections between the composer and his audiences and leading contemporary artists (including Tiepolo, Mengs, Kauffman, Goya, David, Messerschmidt, Loutherbourg, Canova, Copley, Fuseli, Reynolds, Gillray and West) are examined here for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, populism was beginning to be regarded with scepticism and disdain. Mozart was the modern Raphael, Beethoven the modern Michelangelo. Haydn, however, had no clear parallel in the accepted canon of Renaissance art. Yet his recognition that ordinary people had a desire to experience simultaneous aural and visual stimulation was not altogether lost, finding future exponents in Wagner and later still in the cinematic arts.

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.

The Musical World of Marie-Antoinette

The Musical World of Marie-Antoinette PDF Author: Barrington James
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476684367
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
For decades, eighteenth-century Paris had been declining into a baroque backwater. Spectacles at the opera, once considered fit for a king, had become "hell for the ears," wrote playwright Carlos Goldoni. Then, in 1774, with the crowning of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Paris became one of the world's most vibrant musical centers. Austrian composer Christophe-Willibald Gluck, protege of the queen, introduced a new kind of tragic opera--dramatic, human and closer to nature. The expressive pantomime known as ballet d'action, forerunner of the modern ballet, replaced stately court dancing. Along the boulevards, people whistled lighter tunes from the Italian opera, where the queen's favorite composer, Andre Modeste Gretry, ruled supreme. This book recounts Gluck's remaking of the grand operatic tragedy--long symbolic of absolute monarchy--and the vehement quarrels between those who embraced reform and those who preferred familiar baroque tunes or the sweeter melodies of Italy. The turmoil was an important element in the ferment that led to the French Revolution and the beheading of the queen.

Dramma Per Musica

Dramma Per Musica PDF Author: Reinhard Strohm
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300064544
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
'Dramma per musica', the most usual term for Italian serious opera from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, was a modern, enlightened form of theater that presented a unified, artistically designed, dramatic enactment of human stories, expressed by the voice and underscored by the orchestra. This book illustrates the diversity of this baroque art form and explains how it has given us opera as we know it.

Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France

Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: David Charlton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316515842
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A major re-orientation in understanding opera, exploring musical comedies with spoken dialogue previously excluded from historical accounts.

Essays on Opera, 1750-1800

Essays on Opera, 1750-1800 PDF Author: JohnA. Rice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351567888
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has flourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social, and political context has vastly increased. This volume explores opera and operatic life of the years 1750-1800 through a selection of articles intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.