Verdi in Performance

Verdi in Performance PDF Author: Alison Latham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198167358
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This collection of essays addresses the issue of how to make Verdi's operas relevant to modern audiences while respecting the composer's intentions. Here, both scholars and music and stage practitioners reflect current thinking on matters such as "authentic" staging, performance practice, and the role of critical editions.

Verdi in Performance

Verdi in Performance PDF Author: Alison Latham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198167358
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays addresses the issue of how to make Verdi's operas relevant to modern audiences while respecting the composer's intentions. Here, both scholars and music and stage practitioners reflect current thinking on matters such as "authentic" staging, performance practice, and the role of critical editions.

Verdi's Middle Period

Verdi's Middle Period PDF Author: Martin Chusid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226106586
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
During the middle phase of his career, 1849-1859, Verdi created some of his best-loved and most frequently performed operas, including Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, and Un ballo in maschera. This was also the period in which he wrote his first completely original French grand opera, Les Vepres siciliennes; the first version of Simon Boccanegra; and the intensely dramatic Stiffelio, until recent years the most neglected of all Verdi's mature works for the operatic stage. Featuring contributions from many of the most active Verdi scholars in the United States and Europe, Verdi's Middle Period explores the operas composed during this period from three interlinked perspectives: studies of the original source material, cross-disciplinary analyses of musical and textual issues, and the relationship of performance practice to Verdi's musical and dramatic conception. Both musicologists and serious opera buffs will enjoy this distinguished collection.

Performance Practice

Performance Practice PDF Author: Roland Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136767703
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
Performance practice is the study of how music was performed over the centuries, both by its originators (the composers and performers who introduced the works) and, later, by revivalists. This first of its kind Dictionary offers entries on composers, musiciansperformers, technical terms, performance centers, musical instruments, and genres, all aimed at elucidating issues in performance practice. This A-Z guide will help students, scholars, and listeners understand how musical works were originally performed and subsequently changed over the centuries. Compiled by a leading scholar in the field, this work will serve as both a point-of-entry for beginners as well as a roadmap for advanced scholarship in the field.

Rigoletto

Rigoletto PDF Author: Giuseppe Verdi
Publisher: Alma Books
ISBN: 071454499X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
The subject cannot fail!' exulted Verdi, when recommending Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse to his librettist. But the censors made every effort to stop it, and the baritone was not easily convinced that a hunchback role would suit him. Jonathan Keates gives a vivid insight into the composition of a masterpiece. Verdi long afterwards thought it his best work, and Roger Parker explains why. Peter Nichols, author of several bestselling books in Italy, picks out some of the peculiarly Italian attitudes and characters in the opera which make it timeless - and incredibly modern.Contents: Introduction, Jonathan Keates; Musical Commentary, Roger Parker; The Timelessness of 'Rigoletto', Peter Nichols; Rigoletto: Text by Francesco Maria Piave after Victor Hugo's 'Le Roi s'amuse'; Rigoletto: English translation by James Fenton

Verdi in Victorian London

Verdi in Victorian London PDF Author: Massimo Zicari
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 178374216X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Now a byword for beauty, Verdi’s operas were far from universally acclaimed when they reached London in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why did some critics react so harshly? Who were they and what biases and prejudices animated them? When did their antagonistic attitude change? And why did opera managers continue to produce Verdi’s operas, in spite of their alleged worthlessness? Massimo Zicari’s Verdi in Victorian London reconstructs the reception of Verdi’s operas in London from 1844, when a first critical account was published in the pages of The Athenaeum, to 1901, when Verdi’s death received extensive tribute in The Musical Times. In the 1840s, certain London journalists were positively hostile towards the most talked-about representative of Italian opera, only to change their tune in the years to come. The supercilious critic of The Athenaeum, Henry Fothergill Chorley, declared that Verdi’s melodies were worn, hackneyed and meaningless, his harmonies and progressions crude, his orchestration noisy. The scribes of The Times, The Musical World, The Illustrated London News, and The Musical Times all contributed to the critical hubbub. Yet by the 1850s, Victorian critics, however grudging, could neither deny nor ignore the popularity of Verdi’s operas. Over the final three decades of the nineteenth century, moreover, London’s musical milieu underwent changes of great magnitude, shifting the manner in which Verdi was conceptualized and making room for the powerful influence of Wagner. Nostalgic commentators began to lament the sad state of the Land of Song, referring to the now departed "palmy days of Italian opera." Zicari charts this entire cultural constellation. Verdi in Victorian London is required reading for both academics and opera aficionados. Music specialists will value a historical reconstruction that stems from a large body of first-hand source material, while Verdi lovers and Italian opera addicts will enjoy vivid analysis free from technical jargon. For students, scholars and plain readers alike, this book is an illuminating addition to the study of music reception.

The Visual in Performance Practice

The Visual in Performance Practice PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848880669
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2011. Papers from the first global conference of Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice (2010) evoke the multi-role, collaborative sense of a jointly crafted production of new discoveries from theory, concept, and design to realization, reflection, and audience reception.

An Analytical Study on Performance Practices

An Analytical Study on Performance Practices PDF Author: Yaokun Yang
Publisher: AbbottPress
ISBN: 1458214265
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
In this collection of academic essays, award-winning pianist and music professor Yaokun Yang shares her carefully compiled analyses of classical music and aesthetics during several different periods, focusing particularly on the aspect of piano performance practice. Yang, who devoted six years to her research, offers extensive commentary, historical background, and comparisons of varied composers and their music. The pieces she studies include Beethovens piano sonatas, an advanced piano teaching series, the development of opera in different areas, Bachs Brandenburg concertos, Haydns piano sonatas, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Brahmss Intermezzo, Olivier Messiaens Vingt regards sur lenfant-Jsus, Prokofievs piano sonatas, Weberns Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, and Schumanns Piano Concerto. With this collection of analyses, Yang hopes to provide information and commentary to help contemporary pianists recognize the beauty and the challenges of performing different musical styles in appropriate ways.

Opera in Performance

Opera in Performance PDF Author: Clemens Risi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000439887
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers’ bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.

The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia

The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia PDF Author: Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108814140
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Verdi's enduring presence on the opera stages of the world and as a subject for scholarly study by researchers in various disciplines has placed him as a central figure within modern culture. The composer's undisputed popularity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, among enthusiasts and scholars alike, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia. This comprehensive resource covers all aspects of Verdi's music and his world, including the people he knew and worked with, his compositions, and their reception. Extensive appendices list all of Verdi's known works, both published and unpublished, and the characters in his operas. As a starting point for information on specific works, people, places, and concepts, the Encyclopedia reflects the very latest scholarship, presented by an international array of experts in a manner that will have a broad appeal for opera lovers, students, and scholars.

The Politics of Verdi's Cantica

The Politics of Verdi's Cantica PDF Author: Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351541455
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The Politics of Verdi's Cantica treats a singular case study of the use of music to resist oppression, combat evil, and fight injustice. Cantica, better known as Inno delle nazioni / Hymn of the Nations, commissioned from Italy's foremost composer to represent the newly independent nation at the 1862 London International Exhibition, served as a national voice of pride and of protest for Italy across two centuries and in two very different political situations. The book unpacks, for the first time, the full history of Verdi's composition from its creation, performance, and publication in the 1860s through its appropriation as purposeful social and political commentary and its perception by American broadcast media as a 'weapon of art' in the mid twentieth century. Based on largely untapped primary archival and other documentary sources, journalistic writings, and radio and film scripts, the project discusses the changing meanings of the composition over time. It not only unravels the complex history of the work in the nineteenth century, of greater significance it offers the first fully documented study of the performances, radio broadcast, and filming of the work by the renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini during World War II. In presenting new evidence about ways in which Verdi's music was appropriated by expatriate Italians and the US government for cross-cultural propaganda in America and Italy, it addresses the intertwining of Italian and American culture with regard to art, politics, and history; and investigates the ways in which the press and broadcast media helped construct a musical weapon that traversed ethnic, aesthetic, and temporal boundaries to make a strong political statement.