A History of Opera

A History of Opera PDF Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

A History of Opera

A History of Opera PDF Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 648

Get Book Here

Book Description
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

Black Opera

Black Opera PDF Author: Naomi Andre
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050614
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

Opera

Opera PDF Author: Piero Weiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195116380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In Opera: A History in Documents, Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo, to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and to Bertolt Brecht's writing desk, among many other landmarks in opera's history. Weiss expertly guides students, providing highly accessible headnotes to each selection that both contextualize the excerpts and position them within the broader historical narrative. In addition, he offers original translations of more than half of the selections in the book, many of which appear here in English for the first time. Stage settings, costumes, portraits, contemporary playbills, and other illustrations enliven the text and help to recreate the feel of the era under discussion. Opera: A History in Documents is an intrinsically lively text that will enrich college courses on opera and delight any music-loving reader.

Opera in America

Opera in America PDF Author: John Dizikes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300061017
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
This text tells how opera, steeped in European aristocratic tradition, was transplanted into the democratic cultural enviroment of America. It includes vignettes of productions, personalities, audiences and theatres throughout the country from 1735 to the present day.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera PDF Author: Roger Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192854452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.

Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth

Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth PDF Author: Lorenzo Bianconi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226045927
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting its focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon. This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlouse offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera.

The Operatic Archive

The Operatic Archive PDF Author: Colleen Renihan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367134327
Category : History in opera
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Book Description
The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History extends the growing interdisciplinary conversation in opera studies by drawing on new research in performance studies and the philosophy of history. Moving beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of opera, this book argues for opera's powerful potential for historical impact and engagement in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by American composers. Considering opera's ability to serve as a vehicle for memory, historical experience, affect, presence, and the historical sublime, this volume demonstrates how opera's ability to represent and evoke historical events and historical experience differs fundamentally from the representations and recreations of other modes (specifically, literary and dramatic representations). Building on the work of performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, and in consultation with recent debates in the philosophy of history, the book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers, particularly those working in the areas of opera studies and performance studies.

History Through the Opera Glass

History Through the Opera Glass PDF Author: George Jellinek
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879102845
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
(Limelight). This first-of-its-kind, highly entertaining, and carefully researched account reveals how nearly 200 operas by leading composers and librettists have portrayed the major events and personalities of more than 2000 years of history. In a continuous and absorbing narrative, the book sweeps from Roman times to 1820, with a cast of characters that includes Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Attila, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Napoleon and hundreds more. All are seen as the figures historians generally perceive them to have been and as their on-stage counterparts, created and re-imagined by some of opera's greatest artists.

Soap Opera History

Soap Opera History PDF Author: Mary Ann Copeland
Publisher: Bdd Promotional Book Company
ISBN: 9780792454519
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An introduction to the slow-moving world of soap operas includes reviews of major storylines, histories of how each show began, cast lists, and other information on both daytime and evening serials

The History of the Wexford Festival Opera, 1951-2021

The History of the Wexford Festival Opera, 1951-2021 PDF Author: Karina Daly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846829970
Category : Wexford Festival Opera
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In 1951, the first ever Wexford Opera Festival (now known as 'Wexford Festival Opera') took place in a small town in the southeast corner of Ireland. What started out as an informal gathering of friends listening to gramophone music, developed into one of Europe's leading classical music events. T.J. Walsh, a medical doctor by profession and an amateur musician, was the man whose novel idea it was to start an opera festival from such humble beginnings.This book traces the history of the Festival, from its establishment up to the present day. The uneasy shift from amateur status to becoming a more professional body characterised much of the early life of the Festival. The book looks at the spectacular success of what T.J. Walsh had achieved and follows the story through the difficult period in the 1960s when Walsh felt that the Festival was taking a different direction than had been intended from its inception. He never fully reconciled with the new regime and bowed out to leave way for the growing professional outfit. This difficult transition continued throughout the seventies and into an even more difficult financial period in the 1980s. The core focus however remained on producing an impossibly high standard of opera. The next chapter in the Festival's incredible journey saw the replacement of the original Theatre Royal with a purpose built, state-of-the-art opera house, now Ireland's National Opera House.Wexford Festival Opera remains a truly unique cultural event. That it has managed to survive so many significant challenges over 70 years and continued to flourish is a testament to the incredible efforts of those at the helm and the spirit of resilience that is synonymous with the Wexford community. The History of the Wexford Opera Festival, 1951-2021 has been written for those who have enjoyed Wexford Festival Opera over many years, travelling from all over the world because of their love of little-known operas, the standard of Wexford's Festival repertoire and the unique welcome and atmosphere that is synonymous with Wexford at Festival time.