Verdi's Shakespeare

Verdi's Shakespeare PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101545208
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
A dazzling study of the operas Verdi adapted from Shakespeare- and a spellbinding account of their creation. In Verdi's Shakespeare, Pulitzer Prize winner and lifelong opera devotee Garry Wills explores the writing and staging of Verdi's three triumphant Shakespearian operas: Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff. An Italian composer who couldn't read a word of English but adored Shakespeare, Verdi devoted himself to operatic productions that authentically incorporated the playwright's texts. Wills delves into the fast-paced worlds of these men of the theater, focusing on the intense working relationships both Shakespeare and Verdi had with the performers and producers of their works. We see Verdi study the Shakespearean dramaturgy as he obsessively corresponds with his chosen librettists, handpicks the singers he feels are best- suited to the roles, and coaches them intensely. With fascinating portraits of these artistic giants and their entourages, sharp insights into music and theater, and telling historical details, Verdi's Shakespeare re-creates the conditions that allowed Verdi to complete his masterworks and illuminates the very nature of artistic creation.

Verdi's Shakespeare

Verdi's Shakespeare PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101545208
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book

Book Description
A dazzling study of the operas Verdi adapted from Shakespeare- and a spellbinding account of their creation. In Verdi's Shakespeare, Pulitzer Prize winner and lifelong opera devotee Garry Wills explores the writing and staging of Verdi's three triumphant Shakespearian operas: Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff. An Italian composer who couldn't read a word of English but adored Shakespeare, Verdi devoted himself to operatic productions that authentically incorporated the playwright's texts. Wills delves into the fast-paced worlds of these men of the theater, focusing on the intense working relationships both Shakespeare and Verdi had with the performers and producers of their works. We see Verdi study the Shakespearean dramaturgy as he obsessively corresponds with his chosen librettists, handpicks the singers he feels are best- suited to the roles, and coaches them intensely. With fascinating portraits of these artistic giants and their entourages, sharp insights into music and theater, and telling historical details, Verdi's Shakespeare re-creates the conditions that allowed Verdi to complete his masterworks and illuminates the very nature of artistic creation.

Verdi's Shakespeare

Verdi's Shakespeare PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122223
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What the Qur'an Meant, coming fall 2017. "Riveting . . . a double-barreled salvo that hits two bull's-eyes." —The New York Times Book Review This dazzling study of the three operas that Giuseppe Verdi adapted from Shakespeare's plays takes readers on a wonderfully engaging journey through opera, music, literature, history, and the nature of genius. Verdi's Shakespeare explores the writing and staging of Macbetto (Macbeth), Otello (Othello), and Falstaff, operas by Verdi, an Italian composer who could not read a word of English but who adored Shakespeare. Delving into the fast-paced worlds of these men and the hands-on life of the stage that at once challenged them and gave flight to their brilliance, Wills, in his inimitable way, illuminates the birth of artistic creation.

Shakespeare & Opera

Shakespeare & Opera PDF Author: Gary Schmidgall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
If opera had existed in Elizabethan London, the world's Top Bard, as W.H. Auden called him, might have become the world's Top Librettist. In this illuminating study, Gary Schmidgall ranges widely through the Shakespearean canon and the standard operatic repertory and presents a fascinating comparison of the two, focusing on similarities of expressive style, scenic structure, staging, and performance practice. Schmidgall includes both extended discussions of pertinent general issues and concise essays on the most intriguing Shakespeare-based operas. For all who love the stage, Shakespeare and Opera offers endless insight and fascinaton. Schmidgall's extended comparison of the two dramaturgies offers provocative new insights on Shakespeare, musical theater, comparative drama, and theater history.

Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange

Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange PDF Author: Enza De Francisci
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317210840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy PDF Author: Michael Neill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191036145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organised in five sections. The substantial opening section introduces the plays by placing them in a variety of illuminating contexts: as well looking at ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, it addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past, by considering tragedy's relationship to other genres (including history plays, tragicomedy, and satiric drama), and by showing how Shakespeare's tragedies respond to the pressures of early modern politics, religion, and ideas about humanity and the natural world. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies, from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with the extraordinary diversity of twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The thirteen essays of the book's final section seek to expand readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia. Offering the richest and most diverse collection of approaches to Shakespearean tragedy currently available, the Handbook will be an indispensable resource for students both undergraduate and graduate levels, while the lively and provocative character of its essays make will it required reading for teachers of Shakespeare everywhere.

The Singing Turk

The Singing Turk PDF Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804799652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

Aspects of Verdi

Aspects of Verdi PDF Author: George Whitney Martin
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879101725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This collection of original essays ranges widely among the composer's interests and achievements: from his religious views to his skill as a cook, from the politics that galvanized him to the poetry that inspired him, from his earliest compositions to his final masterwork, Falstaff, completed at the age of 80. Drawing on original research and scholarship, this book also contains two of Verdi's early works, never before published in this form; a translated collection of his letters, also heretofore unpublished; the text of the Requiem with indications of Verdi's emphases; and a directory of his operas with sources, casts, theatres, and premiere dates.

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi PDF 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.

Otello

Otello PDF Author: James A. Hepokoski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521277495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Summarises what is currently known about Otello and interprets its significance within Verdi's career.

Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire

Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire PDF Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472558553
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Victor-Marie Hugo, François-Victor Hugo, Boris Leonidivich Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht and Aimé Césaire to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.