Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297654
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. ø In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. ø This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297654
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. ø In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. ø This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

Opera As Drama

Opera As Drama PDF Author: Joseph Kerman
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 030783400X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.

Not Without Madness

Not Without Madness PDF Author: Fabrizio Della Seta
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226749142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In these 12 essays, the author explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theatre. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical and scenic mechanisms in parts of 'La Sonnambula', 'Ernani', 'Aida', 'Le Nozze di Figaro', 'Macbeth' and 'Il Trovatore'. He argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications.

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 Harvard Dictionary of Music

The Harvard Dictionary of Music PDF Author: Don Michael Randel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674011632
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1020

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Book Description
This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today’s beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock. Throughout this Fourth Edition, existing articles have been fine-tuned and new entries added so that the dictionary fully reflects current music scholarship and recent developments in musical culture. Encyclopedia-length articles by notable experts alternate with short entries for quick reference, including definitions and identifications of works and instruments. More than 220 drawings and 250 musical examples enhance the text. This is an invaluable book that no music lover can afford to be without.

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.

Crossroads

Crossroads PDF Author: Dorothy Hobson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
'Crossroads', one of the most successful programmes on television, has attracted a huge and devoted audience of some 15 million regular viewers. Yet, like many soap operas, it is derided by the press and treated with distaste by other programme-makers. Indeed, despite its popularity, its very future currently hangs in the balance. While doing independent research on popular television in the ATV studios in 1981, Dorothy Hobson observed the storm that developed around the company's decision to dispense with Meg Mortimer, star of 'Crossroads'. The repercussions of that announcement were immense and highlighted the gulf between the broadcasting authorities and the progaramme's critics, and the 'Crossroads' production team and the audience. Through talking to the actors, the programme controller and the viewing public, she went on to explore the contradictions of why and how a soap opera is made and viewed, examining the appeal of 'Crossroads' and attempting to locate the programme as part of contemporary popular culture. The result is a revealing, controversial but also very absorbing analysis of a soap opera in crisis.

Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi

Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi PDF Author: Blair Hoxby
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487518099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.

Opera Without Drama

Opera Without Drama PDF Author: Robert Freeman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760

A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760 PDF Author: Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804744379
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 794

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Book Description
From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.