The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930 PDF Author: Susan Rutherford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052185167X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
An examination of the female opera singer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930 PDF Author: Susan Rutherford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052185167X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
An examination of the female opera singer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Rachel Cowgill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971083X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narratives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. And for contemporary audiences, many of these characters--and the celebrated women who played them--still define opera at its finest and most searingly affective, even if storylines leave them swooning and faded by the end of the drama. The presence and representation of women in opera has been addressed in a range of recent studies that offer valuable insights into the operatic stage as cultural space, focusing a critical lens at the text and the position and signification of female characters. Moving that lens onto the historical, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century sheds light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled "doomed women" onstage before an audience. Editors Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss lead a cast of renowned contributors in an impressive display of current approaches to the lives, careers, and performances of female opera singers. Essential theoretical perspectives reflect several broad themes woven through the volume-cultures of celebrity surrounding the female singer; the emergence of the quasi-mythical figure of the diva; explorations of the intricate and sundry arts associated with the prima donna, and with her representation in other media; and the diversity and complexity of contemporary responses to her. The prima donna influenced compositional practices, determined musical and dramatic interpretation, and affected management decisions about the running of the opera house, content of the season, and employment of other artists--a clear demonstration that her position as "first woman" extended well beyond the boards of the operatic stage itself. The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is an important addition to the collections of students and researchers in opera studies, nineteenth-century music, performance and gender/sexuality studies, and cultural studies, as well as to the shelves of opera singers and enthusiasts.

Verdi, Opera, Women

Verdi, Opera, Women PDF Author: Susan Rutherford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107471478
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Verdi's operas - composed between 1839 and 1893 - portray a striking diversity of female protagonists: warrior women and peacemakers, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gypsies, mothers and daughters, erring and idealised wives, and, last of all, a feisty quartet of Tudor townswomen in Verdi's final opera, Falstaff. Yet what meanings did the impassioned crises and dilemmas of these characters hold for the nineteenth-century female spectator, especially during such a turbulent span in the history of the Italian peninsula? How was opera shaped by society - and was society similarly influenced by opera? Contextualising Verdi's female roles within aspects of women's social, cultural and political history, Susan Rutherford explores the interface between the reality of the spectators' lives and the imaginary of the fictional world before them on the operatic stage.

The Prima Donna

The Prima Donna PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Erotic literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Oxford Handbook of Opera

The Oxford Handbook of Opera PDF Author: Helen M. Greenwald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199714843
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1217

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Book Description
What IS opera? Contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Opera respond to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: Words, Music, and Meaning; Performance and Production; Opera and Society; and Transmission and Reception. Individual essays engage with repertoire from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Meyerbeer to Strauss, Henze, and Adams in studies of composition, national identity, transmission, reception, sources, media, iconography, humanism, the art of collecting, theory, analysis, commerce, singers, directors, criticism, editions, politics, staging, race, and gender. The title of the penultimate section, Opera on the Edge, suggests the uncertainty of opera's future: is opera headed toward catastrophe or have social and musical developments of the last hundred years stimulated something new and exciting, and, well, operatic? In an epilogue to the volume, a contemporary opera composer speaks candidly about opera composition today. The Oxford Handbook of Opera is an essential companion to scholars, educators, advanced students, performers, and knowledgeable listeners: those who simply love opera.

Opera Acts

Opera Acts PDF Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004268
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.

French Music in Britain 1830–1914

French Music in Britain 1830–1914 PDF Author: Paul J Rodmell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000281523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
French Music in Britain 1830–1914 investigates the presence, reception and influence of French art music in Britain between 1830 (roughly the arrival of ‘grand opera’ and opéra comique in London) and the outbreak of the First World War. Five chronologically ordered chapters investigate key questions such as: * Where and to whom was French music performed in Britain in the nineteenth century? * How was this music received, especially by journal and newspaper critics and other arbiters of taste? * What characteristics and qualities did British audiences associate with French music? * Was the presence and reception of French music in any way influenced by Franco-British political relations, or other aspects of cultural transfer and exchange? * Were British composers influenced by their French contemporaries to any extent and, if so, in what ways? Placed within the wider social and cultural context of Britain’s most ambiguous and beguiling international relationship, this volume demonstrates how French music became an increasingly significant part of the British musician’s repertory and influenced many composers. This is an important resource for musicologists specialising in Nineteenth-Century Music, Music History and European Music. It is also relevant for scholars and researchers of French Studies and Cultural Studies.

Vocal Virtuosity

Vocal Virtuosity PDF Author: Sean M. Parr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197542662
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Nothing strikes the ear quite like a soprano singing in the sonic stratosphere. Whether thrilling, chilling, or repellent to the listener, the reaction to cascades of coloratura with climaxing high notes is strong. Coloratura-agile, rapid-fire singing-was originally essential for all singers, but its function changed greatly when it became the specialty of particular sopranos over the course of the nineteenth century. The central argument of Vocal Virtuosity challenges the historical commonplace that coloratura became an anachronism in nineteenth-century opera. Instead, the book demonstrates that melismas at mid-century were made modern. Coloratura became an increasingly marked musical gesture during the century with a correspondingly more specific dramaturgical function. In exploring this transformation, the book reveals the instigators of this change in vocal practice and examines the historical traces of Parisian singers who were the period's greatest exponents of vertiginous vocality as archetypes of the modern coloratura soprano. The book constructs the historical trajectory of coloratura as it became gendered the provenance of the female singer, while also considering what melismas can signify in operatic performance. As a whole, it argues that vocal virtuosity was a source of power for women, generating space for female authorship and creativity. In so doing, the book reclaims a place in history for the coloratura soprano.

Women in Music

Women in Music PDF Author: Karin Pendle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135848130
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 870

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Book Description
Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.

Verdis Exceptional Women: Giuseppina Strepponi and Teresa Stolz

Verdis Exceptional Women: Giuseppina Strepponi and Teresa Stolz PDF Author: Caroline Ellsmore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351731637
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
This investigation offers new perspectives on Giuseppe Verdi’s attitudes to women and the functions which they fulfilled for him. The book explores Verdi’s professional and personal relationship with women who were exceptional within the traditional socio-sexual structure of patria potestà, in the context of women’s changing status in nineteenth-century Italian society. It focusses on two women; the singers Giuseppina Strepponi, who supported and enhanced Verdi’s creativity at the beginning of his professional life and Teresa Stolz, who sustained his sense of self-worth at its end. Each was an essential emotional benefactor without whom Verdi’s career would not have been the same. The subject of the Strepponi-Verdi marriage and the impact of Strepponi’s past deserve further detailed and nuanced discussion. This book demonstrates Verdi’s shifting power-balance with Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. The negative stereotypes concerning operatic ‘divas’ do not withstand scrutiny when applied either to Strepponi or to Stolz. This book presents a revisionist appraisal of Stolz through close examination of her letters. Revealing Stolz’s value to Verdi, they also provide contemporary operatic criticism and behind-the-scenes comment, some excerpts of which are published here in English for the first time.