Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691172862
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer’s place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini’s orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca’s notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson.
Author: Mosco Carner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521296618
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
A guide for opera goers to Tosca, which includes a synopsis of the plot and discussions on style.
Author: Linda B. Fairtile
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135592349
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Scholarly recognition of Giacomo Puccini's achievements as a musical dramatist has been growing steadily for more than 75 years. This useful volume surveys and evaluates close to 700 books and articles about the composer, written in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Additional features include an essay on the evolution of Puccini studies, an annotated discography/videography, a guide to manuscript materials, and a list of organizations devoted to Puccini. This useful volume surveys and evaluates close to 700 books and articles about the composer, written in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Additional features include an essay on the evolution of Puccini studies, an annotated discography/videography, a guide to manuscript materials, and a list of organizations devoted to Puccini.
Author: William Berger
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307542904
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
Puccini is the most beloved composer of opera in the world: one quarter of all opera performances in the U.S. are of his operas, his music pervades movie soundtracks, and his plots have infiltrated our popular culture. But, although Puccini’s art still captivates audiences and the popularity of such works as Tosca, La Bohéme, and Madama Butterfly has never waned, he has long been a victim of critical snobbery and cultural marginalization. In this witty and informative guide for beginners and fans alike, William Berger sets the record straight, reclaiming Puccini as a serious artist. Combining his trademark irreverent humor with passionate enthusiasm, Berger strikes just the right balance of introductory information and thought-provoking analysis. He includes a biography, discussions of each opera, a glossary, fun facts and anecdotes, and above all keen insight into Puccini’s enduring power. For anyone who loves Puccini and for anyone who just wonders what all the fuss is about, Puccini Without Excuses is funny, challenging, and always a pleasure to read. INCLUDES: • Why Puccini’s art and its message of hope is crucial to our world today • How Anglo audiences often miss the mythic significance of his operas • The use of his music as shorthand in films, from A Room with a View to Fatal Attraction • A scene-by scene analysis of each opera • A guide to the wealth of available recordings, books, and videos
Author: William Ashbrook
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400866677
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Unfinished at Puccini's death in 1924, Turandot was not only his most ambitious work, but it became the last Italian opera to enter the international repertory. In this colorful study two renowned music scholars demonstrate that this work, despite the modern climate in which it was written, was a fitting finale for the centuries-old Great Tradition of Italian opera. Here they provide concrete instances of how a listener might encounter the dramatic and musical structures of Turandot in light of the Italian melodramma, and firmly establish Puccini's last work within the tradition of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. In a summary of the sounds, sights, and symbolism of Turandot, the authors touch on earlier treatments of the subject, outline the conception, birth, and reception of the work, and analyze its coordinated dramatic and musical design. Showing how the evolution of the libretto documents Puccini's reversion to large musical forms typical of the Great Tradition in the late nineteenth century, they give particular attention to his use of contrasting Romantic, modernist, and two kinds of orientalist coloration in the general musical structure. They suggest that Puccini's inability to complete the opera resulted mainly from inadequate dramatic buildup for Turandot's last-minute change of heart combined with an overly successful treatment of the secondary character.
Author: Pietro Mascagni
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Turiddu, a young villager, is the son of Lucia, and the lover of Lola, (who is the wife of Alfio; having married the latter during Turiddu's prolonged absence in military service). Turiddu wins the affections of Santuzza, whom he wrongs; while, in the meantime, he is intimate with Lola. On Easter morning, (the opening of the opera), Alfio is incidentally informed, by Santuzza, of his wife's unfaithful actions. He challenges Turiddu (biting the ear, as was the rustic Sicilian custom). Turiddu, though regretting his past evil course, accepts the challenge and is killed by Alfio.
Author: Alan Mallach
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555535247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Just twenty-six when the electrifying premiere of his Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome catapulted the impoverished musician into sudden fame and fortune, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) went on to write fifteen more operas, including L'Amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Iris, Parisina, and Il Piccolo Marat. With privileged access to extensive primary sources, including Mascagni's 4,200 letters to Anna Lolli, his mistress for more than three decades, author Alan Mallach provides a compelling portrait of a flamboyant, combative, and emotional man who was passionately devoted to the Italian opera tradition and committed to innovation in musical language and dramatic form. Deftly combining serious biography with critical commentary, Mallach begins with the captivating story of Mascagni's rags-to-riches adventure, from his birth in Livorno in Tuscany, to his musical studies first with Alfredo Soffredini and later at the Milan Conservatory, to his years as a vagabond musician, to the worldwide success of his breakthrough opera. He then traces Mascagni's private and professional life after Cavalleria, examining a prolific yet controversial career that was forever overshadowed by the work that unexpectedly thrust him into the limelight. Mallach provides a full analysis of Mascagni's oeuvre and discusses his complex relationships with such Italian cultural and political figures as Edoardo Sonzogno, Giacomo Puccini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Illica, and Benito Mussolini. He also thoroughly chronicles Mascagni's bouts with manic depression, his marriage to Lina and devotion to their three children, his grueling schedule of concert and operatic tours, his patriotism and bitter opposition to Italy's involvement in both world wars, and his passionate love affair with Anna Lolli. This richly textured biography will appeal to fans of the still beloved and popular Cavalleria, and it will introduce opera enthusiasts to the power, intensity, and melodic beauty of the brilliant composer's many other significant works.
Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520310810
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner explores the latest developments in opera analysis by considering, side by side, the works of the two greatest opera composers of the nineteenth century. Although the juxtaposition is not new, comparative studies have tended to view these masters as radically different both as musicians and as musical dramatists. Wagner and his "symphonic opera" set against Verdi "the melodist" is one of many familiar antitheses, and it serves to highlight the particular terms from which comparisons are often made. In this book some of the leading and most innovative music scholars challenge this view, suggesting that as we become more distant from the nineteenth century, we may see that Verdi and Wagner confronted largely similar problems, and even on occasion found similar solutions. But more than this, Analyzing Opera sets out to demonstrate the richness and variety of modern analytical approaches to the genre. As the editors point out in their introduction, today's musical scholars increasingly question the usefulness of organicist theories in analytical studies, and, as they do so, opera seems to become an ever more central area of investigation. Opera is peculiar: its clash of verbal, musical, and visual systems can produce incongruities and extravagant miscalculations. It invites a multiplicity of approaches, challenges orthodoxy, and embraces ambiguity. The sheer variety of essays presented here is witness to this fact and suggests that analyzing opera is one of the liveliest (and most polemical) areas in modern-day musical scholarship. Contributors: Philip Gossett, John Deathridge, James A. Hepokoski, Joseph Kerman, Thomas S. Grey, Matthew Brown, Anthony Newcomb, Martin Chusid, David Lawton, and Patrick McCreless. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.
Author: Axel Körner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843867
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.
Author: Konrad Claude Dryden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Franco Alfano: Transcending Turandot is the first fully documented biography in any language of Italy's last verismo composer, Franco Alfano (1875-1954), the composer chosen to complete Giacomo Puccini's swansong, Turandot, in 1924. Alfano remains one of the most undervalued composers, despite arguably representing the best of Puccini's contemporaries. His ability and prowess and his intimate friendship with Puccini, led to his selection for Turandot's completion: a daunting, enervating, and ultimately thankless task, which nearly robbed him of sight. This biography finally sheds light on Alfano's view of the events, as opposed to the all-too customary Toscanini/Puccini perspective, thereby revealing a largely unknown facet of one of the most important operatic works of the 20th-century. Konrad Dryden, a friend of the composer's late daughter, Nina Alfano, sets out to unravel and organize the facts of Alfano's life, offering a chronological presentation of the composer's vita as well as an examination of his major operas and their literary origins, providing the most complete portrait of the composer to date. Based on unpublished correspondence from international archives freshly translated by Dryden, the book also sheds light on such colleagues and contemporaries as Puccini, Toscanini, Mary Garden, Edward Johnson, Giordano, Rostand, Mascagni, and Mussolini. A selection of previously unpublished photographs is included, as well as plot synopses of Alfano's operatic works. A foreword by the legendary soprano Magda Olivero-his preferred interpreter and Li in the world premiere recording of Turandot-and an appendix listing the composer's opus round out this important reference.
