Author: Giorgio Lotti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780688034931
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Author: Giorgio Bagnoli
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671870424
Category : Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Covering a broad range of styles, this comprehensive volume includes entries for more than 450 operas that have been performed over the last four centuries. Organized from A to Z for easy reference, it's a complete guide that's certain to inform and entertain any opera buff. 500 photos.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description

Author: Gregory W. Harwood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415881897
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
This comprehensive research guide surveys the most significant published materials relating to Giuseppe Verdi. This new edition includes research since the publication of the first edition in 1998.

Author: Richard Somerset-Ward
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300099683
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"Whether they were male or female, these singers wre amazing vertuosi, perhaps the greatest singers there have ever been - "angels." Unfortunately, some of them (and often the most famous) were also capable of behaving extremely badly, both on and off stage - "monsters." This book tells their colorful stories."--Jacket.

Author: Marjorie Wright
Publisher: Janus Publishing Company Lim
ISBN: 1857566122
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
An autobiography charting Marjorie Wright's career in opera. At the height of her career, Marjorie Wright bathed in the limelight of the operatic circle, as a renowned opera diva. Then her world fell apart. The 'politics' and back-stabbing in this operatic circle finally saw her falling from grace, to the lowest ebb one could imagine.

Author: Ethan Mordden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190877707
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Building on the long-established success of Ethan Mordden's Opera Anecdotes, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes continues where the original left off, bringing into view the new corps of major singers that arose after the first book's publication in 1985 -- artists such as Renee Fleming, Roberto Alagna, Deborah Voigt, Jonas Kaufmann, Kathleen Battle, and Jane Eaglen (who tested her family with Turandot's three riddles and got a very original answer). There are also fresh adventures with opera's fabled great -- Rossini, Wagner, Toscanini (whose temper tantrums are always good for a story), Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price (who, when the Met's Rudolf Bing offered her the voice-killing role of Abigaille in Verdi's Nabucco, said, "Man, are you crazy?"). Almost all the stories in The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes are completely new, whether from the present or the past, taking in many historical developments, from the rise of the conductor to the appearance of the gymmed-up "bari-hunk" who refuses to play any role in which he can't appear shirtless. While most of Mordden's anecdotes are humorous, some are emotionally touching, such as one recounting a Met production of Mozart's The Marriage Of Figaro in which Renee Fleming sang alongside her own six-year-old daughter. Other tales are suspenseful, as when Tito Gobbi shows off his ability to make anyone turn around simply by staring at his or her back. He tries it on Nazi monster Joseph Goebbels, who does turn around, and then starts to move toward Gobbi, seething with rage, step by step... Mordden recounts these stories in his own unique voice, amplifying events for reading pleasure and adding in background material so the opera newcomer can play on the same field as the aficionado. Witty, dramatoic, and at times a little shocking, The New Book Of Opera Anecdotes will be a welcome addition to any opera fan's library.

Author: George Whitney Martin
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879101602
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
(Limelight). This book relates the life and experiences of composer Giuseppe Verdi, from his birth in 1813 to his death in 1901. Besides documenting Verdi's life and the music he created, it also goes further in discussing the times and culture in which he was living in 19th century Italy, both socially and politically. "A complete life-to-death biography, wonderfully comprehensive on both life and art, wonderfullly sensible, and splendidly gotten up." The Boston Herald

Author: Chandler Carter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041619
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it—his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

Author: Kenneth A. Christensen
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1493190687
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Kenneth A. Christensens THE TOSCANINI MYSTIQUE, is the first full length biography about the legendary Italian conductors life and career in almost thirty-five years. Maestro Toscanini had a frigid and extremely unhappy childhood, along with a severe musical education at the Parma Conservatory. This unglamorized account of a gifted teenagers professional conducting debut at Rio de Janerios Teatro Imperial, is told as it really happened. Toscanini was married to a ballerina, Carla De Martini, who bore him four children, but also had an illegitimate son with a gifted soprano, who was born retarded. Toscaninis vulgar mistreatment of nearly all the singers and musicians who performed under his direction was legendary, and is examined with unusual insight about his uncanny memory and talent for musical recreation. The recollection of many famous artists including Caruso, Debussy, Kreisler, Puccini, Stravinsky, Verdi, and Wagners descendants are quoted alongside his confrontations with Hitler, Mussolini and the Sicilian mafia. But the Maestro also was the most generous of all musicians, donating both his time and talents to many worthwhile charities, for which he received no financial compensation. The life of this great conductor is presented as the struggles of a musical and theatrical reformer, who was a major historical figure that just happened to be one of the greatest musicians who ever lived. Mr. Christensen has painstakingly wrote his narrative, using all the previous biographies and magazine articles on his life, the scripts of two video documentaries and the liner notes for the most widely available re-releases of his recordings. He rewrote and clarified the awkward original Italian translations for non-specialist readers and has supplied new English translations for the numerous operatic titles and other musical works as well as all the foreign language newspapers, magazines and theatres mentioned in the text. In addition, he has provided professional critiques on the most widely available Toscanini recordings from RCA Victors Arturo Toscanini Collection, and historic reissues of Toscaninis NBC radio broadcast concerts. Here was a man, who had the nerve to stand up to world dictators and fought hard to prevent the Western worlds supreme musical masterpieces from being abused and mistreated, but without taking any credit for laboriously recreating all these composers inspiration. He enjoyed to play practical jokes on his family and friends, but this humorous side is known only through letters, because Toscanini never published any autobiography or memoirs about his art. Toscanini gave the world premieres of 14 operas, including Leoncavallos Pagliacci, and three by Puccini, including La Boheme, La Fanciulla del West and Turandot. Toscanini served as musical director: the Teatro Regio in Turino (1895-98), La Scala in Milano (1898-1908), New Yorks Metropolitan Opera (1908-1915), barely missed dying upon the Lusitania, becoming musical director of La Scala again (1920-1929), the New York Philharmonic (1926-1936), and the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937-1954). In between, he also guest conducted at the Bayreuth, Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals and conducted the inaugural concerts of the Palestine Symphony. Toscanini then recorded his most important repertory with the BBC Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and NBC Symphony Orchestras, alongside the Robert Shaw Chorale and such esteemed soloists as Jascha Heifetz, Rudolf Serkin, plus, his own son-in-law Vladimir Horowitz. His seven operatic recordings featured Jan Peerce, Helen Traubel, Richard Tucker, Giuseppe di Stefano, Rose Bampton, Cesare Siepi, Herva Nelli, Licia Albanese, Robert Merrill, Jussi Bjoerling, Lauritz Melchior, and many other gifted singers and musicians of the past, whose names alone are too much to mention.