This guide to the works of Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi offers both new opera fans and experts a discography, bibliography, and list of all existing productions of Verdi's compositions.
In this story set in Milan, Italy, an opera-loving cat finds a unique way to share her singing skills with the world. Black line and watercolor illustrations accompany the text.
Italy was the birthplace of opera. In this authoritative and accessible account of Italian opera, David Kimbell introduces the composers and dramatists, the singers and audiences who, over three hundred years, have created not only a national tradition but the central tradition from which others have drawn their inspiration. He traces the history ...
Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty ...
In this valuable collection of essays, published to coincide with the tercentenary of Handel's birth, Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition, focusing on the Italian school, to which they are so crucially indebted. Handel's immediate heritage included the figures of ...
Each entry in the New Grove Guides series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed. These unique books compile the meticulously researched articles into ...
Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly USD5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have ...
Imagine learning Italian through opera. This publication seeks to help students do just that. Designed to supplement intermediate level programmes, the text can be used in courses emphasizing language, conversation, and/or culture. Six operas are examined: "Il barbiere di Siviglia", "La Boheme", "Pagliacci", "Otello", "Tosca" and "La traviata". ...
In mid seventeenth-century Venice, opera first emerged from courts and private drawing rooms to become a form of public entertainment. Early commercial operas were elaborate spectacles, featuring ornate costumes and set design along with dancing and music. As ambitious works of theater, these productions required not only significant financial ...
"Divas and Scholars" is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett's personal experiences of triumphant - and even failed - performances and suffused with his towering passion for music. Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings to life the problems, and ...
The early 19th century was a period of acute transition in operatic tradition and style, when time-honoured practices gave way to the developing aesthetics of Romanticism, the rise of the tenor overtook the falling stars of the castrati, and the heroic, the masculine, and the feminine were profoundly reconfigured. These transformations resounded ...
Focusing on Verdi's French operas, Giger shows how the composer acquired an ever better understanding of the various approaches to French versification while gradually bringing his works in line with French melodic aesthetic. In his first French opera, Jerusalem, Verdi treated the text in an overly cautious manner, trying to avoid prosodic ...
In "Opera Observed", William C. Holmes provides a look behind the scenes into the world of early 18th-century Italian opera. Based on a store of recovered documents, mainly the personal papers of Luca Casimiro degli Albizzi, this social history illustrates the complexities of staging opera in the 1720s and '30s: the role of the impresario in ...
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 ...
Best remembered today for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting a traditional account of Rossini's life and ...
This work gives an enriching and helpful account of Opera theatres and festivals in Italy, including background and historical information, design descriptions, interesting anecdotes of performers and audiences, and pertinent travel information.
In this unusual study, Emanuele Senici explores the connection between landscape and gender in Italian opera through the emblematic figure of the Alpine virgin. In the nineteenth century, operas portraying an emphatically virginal heroine, a woman defined by her virginity, were often set in the mountains, most frequently the Alps. The clarity of ...
With the passing of giants like Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and with Verdi in decline, Italian opera at the end of the nineteenth century appeared to be on the wane. Then, suddenly, with the legendary premiere of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" in 1890, Italian opera entered into a period of enormous artistic creativity and commercial ...
This interdisciplinary study attempts to make sense of what has long been regarded as a chaotic period in the history of opera in London. In 1778 R. B. Sheridan acquired the King's Theatre and its resident opera company in what we would now call a leveraged buy-out, plunging the opera into escalating debts that were to haunt it into the 1840s. The ...
Bel canto singing was a historical phenomenon which embraced Italian opera of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It required infinite variety of sound, in particular a lyrical ecstasy, a faultless technique to dispatch the vocal pyrotechnics demanded of it, and earned itself eloquent praise as 'the singing which is heard within the soul'. ...
"The History of Italian Opera" marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting the focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre ...
This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise ...
The purpose of this series is to provide a large repertoiry of 17th century Italian sacred music in clear modern editions that are both practical and faithful to the original sources.
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