Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family

Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family PDF Author: Elaine Thornton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781912676750
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The first Jewish composer to achieve international fame, he staged his grand operas in France. His second work, Les Huguenots, became the first opera to reach 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra. He was born in Berlin in 1791 as Meyer Beer, the eldest son of Jacob and Amalia Beer. As European Jews emerged from the ghetto, his wealthy parents took a leading role in creating a more integrated Jewish identity. Jacob became a pioneer of Reform Judaism, while Amalia held a glittering musical salon. His brother Wilhelm built an observatory, where he and his scientific partner, Johann Mädler, made the first accurate maps of the moon and Mars. A milestone in the history of astronomy. Later Wilhelm became a railway entrepreneur, a banker and a politician. The youngest son Michael was a dramatist and poet who died at the age of 33. His third play was admired by Goethe, who staged it at Weimar. This biography reveals the story of a remarkable family who fought prejudice and intolerance to become role models for their contemporaries, and whose lives illuminate a crucial and formative period in German-Jewish history

Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family

Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family PDF Author: Elaine Thornton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781912676750
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The first Jewish composer to achieve international fame, he staged his grand operas in France. His second work, Les Huguenots, became the first opera to reach 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra. He was born in Berlin in 1791 as Meyer Beer, the eldest son of Jacob and Amalia Beer. As European Jews emerged from the ghetto, his wealthy parents took a leading role in creating a more integrated Jewish identity. Jacob became a pioneer of Reform Judaism, while Amalia held a glittering musical salon. His brother Wilhelm built an observatory, where he and his scientific partner, Johann Mädler, made the first accurate maps of the moon and Mars. A milestone in the history of astronomy. Later Wilhelm became a railway entrepreneur, a banker and a politician. The youngest son Michael was a dramatist and poet who died at the age of 33. His third play was admired by Goethe, who staged it at Weimar. This biography reveals the story of a remarkable family who fought prejudice and intolerance to become role models for their contemporaries, and whose lives illuminate a crucial and formative period in German-Jewish history

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1791-1839

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1791-1839 PDF Author: Giacomo Meyerbeer
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637890
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description


Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris PDF Author: Mark Everist
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100093912X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Paris attracted foreign musicians like a magnet. The city boasted a range of theatres and of genres represented there, a wealth of libretti and source material for them, vocal, orchestral and choral resources, to say nothing of the set designs, scenery and costumes. All this contributed to an artistic environment that had musicians from Italian- and German-speaking states beating a path to the doors of the Académie Royale de Musique, Opéra-Comique, Théâtre Italien, Théâtre Royal de l'Odéon and Théâtre de la Renaissance. This book both tracks specific aspects of this culture, and examines stage music in Paris through the lens of one of its most important figures: Giacomo Meyerbeer. The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris. Meyerbeer's acculturation to Parisian theatrical mores is then examined, especially his moves from the Odéon and Opéra-Comique to the opera house where he eventually made his greatest impact - the Académie Royale de Musique; the shift from Opéra-Comique is then counterpointed by an examination of how an indigenous Parisian composer, Fromental Halévy, made exactly the same leap at more or less the same time. The book continues with the fates of other composers in Paris: Weber, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner, but concludes with the final Parisian successes that Meyerbeer lived to see - his two opéras comiques.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

Giacomo Meyerbeer PDF Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781527503960
Category : Jewish composers
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Giacomo Meyerbeer was once one of the most famous of all opera composers, enjoying into the twentieth century the same universal admiration and performance as a composer like Puccini does today.Through a series of adverse factors, his reputation was seriously damaged with the resurgence of nationalism and the growing ant-Semitism in France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the propagation of a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic, the decline of the bel canto vocal tradition, and the disfavour manifested towards the heroism of French grand opera. All these factors, and especially the ban on his music in Nazi Germany, meant that Meyerbeer's reputation was seriously overshadowed in the years after the Second World War. During the 1960s and 1970s, a tentative interest began to manifest itself, and with the advent of the new millennium, a growing rediscovery of his operas has been apparent. Not least in this process has been the recovery of all the composer's private papers and their scholarly editing. His life and work have been the subject of a growing number of informed studies which have enabled radical reassessment. This volume takes a fresh look at this process of rediscovery by considering the composer in terms of the primary sources (diaries and letters) now available for forming a more complete and detailed biography unclouded by prejudicial or uninformed opinions. The extraordinary nature of Meyerbeer's Jewish background and the role of this family in Prussian emancipation are also considered. Most importantly, however, his life and works are presented in a critical chronology that is fundamentally based on his own private papers, with testimony (both positive and negative) from many contemporary sources. A detailed iconography is integral to this process, and helps to bring Meyerbeer's story and music more vividly to life.

Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Deliberately Forgotten Composer

Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Deliberately Forgotten Composer PDF Author: David Faiman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789657023150
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots

Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots PDF Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443860840
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
On 29 February 1836, Les Huguenots, a grand opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), with words by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and Émile Deschamps (1791–1871), was performed for the first time, at the Paris Opéra. It was to be one of the most successful productions ever staged at the Opéra, with 1,126 performances in Paris over the next hundred years, and, in the process, breaking all box office records. It became Meyerbeer’s most popular work, with thousands of stagings throughout the world. Les Huguenots is a huge exploration of faith, tolerance, hatred, extermination, love, loyalty, self-sacrifice and hope in despair. It is the first panel in a central diptych on the Reformation, at the heart of the wider tetralogy of Meyerbeer’s grand operas, where issues of power, religion and love are examined in a variety of modes. For five years after the sensational premiere of Robert le Diable, Meyerbeer worked on this gigantic drama, partly adapted by Scribe from Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique de Charles IX. Meyerbeer matches the text in drama, splendour and ceremony: it combines theatricalism with profound depths of feeling. Its gorgeous colouring, intense passion, consistency of dramatic treatment, and careful delineation of character secured for this work vast fame and influence. It was an epoch-making opera, an enduring monument to Meyerbeer’s fame. The music for this sombre tapestry of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre springs from the core of the vivid action, and creates a panoramic alternation of moods, that capture the tragedy of religious intolerance and personal anguish in one of the most fraught events in history, when some 30,000 French Protestants were murdered during 24 August 1574. Meyerbeer’s music rises to the occasion, and reaches sublime heights of music drama, especially in the fourth and fifth acts, with the Blessing of the Daggers (one of the most electric scenes in all opera), the more powerful Love Duet, and the Trio of Martyrdom in the last moments of the opera. Spectacle was incorporated in the plot, in Meyerbeer’s concern to conjure up the couleur locale of those heroic times. In spite of the overwhelming dramatic power and the instrumental riches of the score, the most significant aspect of the work came to be regarded as the supremacy of the seven principal vocal parts. Performances of Les Huguenots at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the 1890s were among the most famous in operatic history.

Meyerbeer's Italian Operas

Meyerbeer's Italian Operas PDF Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527539113
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Giacomo Meyerbeer is the only composer who wrote for three different and equally important eras of 19th century music. His works straddle the German Romantic school, Italian bel canto and French grand opera and opéra-comique. After his early career in Berlin, Darmstadt, Munich and Vienna, Meyerbeer famously travelled to Italy where he lived for ten years. His six operas written between 1817 and 1824 established Meyerbeer as a significant composer in Italy, with an international reputation growing more or less incrementally with each new work. The treasures of these works have been rediscovered in recent decades (1979-2019). This study examines these works in terms of origins, content and performance history.

Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

Meyerbeer's L'Africaine PDF Author: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581039
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Vasco de Gama was the last collaboration between Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugène Scribe, the famous playwright and librettist. The work had intermittently preoccupied them both since 1838, and it had become legendary as L’Africaine years before its completion. The first version of the opera became known as the Vecchia Africana of the long years of Meyerbeer’s anxious labours on this most troublesome of his operas An adoring public gave Meyerbeer a tumultuous posthumous accolade on the première of L'Africaine on 28 April 1865, a year after his death. This opera which involved Meyerbeer and Scribe’s creative energies for so long includes in one last and splendid achievement many of the elements that had hitherto featured in varying degrees in all their other joint creations. Both composer and librettist were men of immense imagination and genius. Between them, they created four works of great power and beauty that radically affected the history of opera. This study examines the origins and creation of the opera, its dramaturgy and musical style, the history of its astonishing reception around the world until the 1930s, its revival in more recent times. One of the special features of the book is the collection of iconography associated with the work, and its interpretation by many of the greatest singers of the Golden Age of opera. This imagery and many musical examples help to bring out the themes explored in this work more fully.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Life in Letters

Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Life in Letters PDF Author: Giacomo Meyerbeer
Publisher: Portland, Or. : Amadeus Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850

Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850 PDF Author: Christopher John Murray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781579584221
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
Review: "Written to stress the crosscurrent of ideas, this cultural encyclopedia provides clearly written and authoritative articles. Thoughts, themes, people, and nations that define the Romantic Era, as well as some frequently overlooked topics, receive their first encyclopedic treatments in 850 signed articles, with bibliographies and coverage of historical antecedents and lingering influences of romanticism. Even casual browsers will discover much to enjoy here."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.