Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794-1854) was a legendary tenor and the first 19th-century non-castrati male singer to become an international star of opera.
Titles in The Listener's Companion: A Scarecrow Press Music Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers.
In this revised and expanded edition of Operas in English: A Dictionary, Margaret Ross Griffel updates her work on operas written specifically to an English text, including not only works originally in English but also those set to new English librettos.
Known worldwide as a composer of symphonies and chamber music, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak declared toward the end of his life that his main love was writing operas.
Opera has been around ever since the late 16th century, and it is still going strong in the sense that operas are performed around the world at present, and known by infinitely more persons than just those who attend performances.
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.
Shortly after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death, his widow Constanze sent a manuscript copy of one of his most beloved operas, Die Zauberflote, to the court of the Elector of Cologne.
Opera has been around ever since the late 16th century, and it is still going strong in the sense that operas are performed around the world at present, and known by infinitely more persons than just those who attend performances.
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.
Titles in The Listener's Companion: A Scarecrow Press Music Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers.
A rare look at the life and music of renowned Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-KorsakovDuring his lifetime, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a composer whose work had great influence not only in his native Russia but also internationally.
This new edition of leading opera critic Rupert Christiansen's perennially popular Pocket Guide has between extensively revised, and incorporates many more operas from all periods, including recent works by Philip Glass, Mark Anthony Turnage, Thomas Ades and George Benjamin.
Susie Gilbert traces the development of ENO from its earliest origins in the darkest Victorian slums of the Cut, where it was conceived as a vehicle of social reform, through two world wars, and via Sadler's Wells to its great glory days at the Coliseum and beyond.
Race, politics, and opera production during apartheid South Africa intersect in this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a ';coloured' cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape.
Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism in late seventeenth-century Italian opera, contextualizing the genre amid the broad ocularcentric debates emerging at the crossroads of the early modern period and the Enlightenment.
The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad.
In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera.
Beyond Reasonrelates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career:Der Ring des Nibelungen,Tristan und Isolde,Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, andParsifal.
In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann.
Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic period-Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini-regarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank?
The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain.
In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill's complete stage works, Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater's key figures.
This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society.
In this enlightening and entertaining book, one of the most original and sophisticated musicologists writing today turns his attention to music's most dramatic genre.
John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music.
When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "e;the most enthusiastic mimomaniac"e; ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements.
In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview.
In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China.
Parisian theatrical, artistic, social, and political life comes alive in Mark Everist's impressive institutional history of the Paris Odeon, an opera house that flourished during the Bourbon Restoration.
An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age.
Opera developed during a time when the position of women-their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality-was constantly debated.
