Best known as the story from the 1904 Puccini opera, the compelling modern myth of Madame Butterfly has been read, watched, and re-interpreted for over a century, from Pierre Loti's 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème to A.
English Dramatick Opera, 1661-1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "e;dramatick opera"e;, which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century.
Unlike collections of essays which focus on a single century or whose authors are drawn from a single discipline, this collection reflects the myriad performance options available to London audiences, offering readers a composite portrait of the music, drama, and dance productions that characterized this rich period.
A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuriesThe Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century.
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.
There is often a dichotomy between the academic approach to singing that voice students learn in the studio and what professional singers do on the operatic and concert stage.
In Robert Ward's The Crucible: Creating an American Musical Nationalism, Robert Paul Kolt explores the life of the American composer Robert Ward through an examination of his most popular and enduring work, The Crucible.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976.
Throughout early modern Europe, patronage became a means for the dominant classes to highlight their wealth, intellectual finesse, and cultural and political agendas, particularly within the court and religious institutions.
Opera is a fragile, complex art, but it flourished extravagantly in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years, a time when daily life in the city was filled with gambling, duels, murder, and suicide.
This book establishes the cultural background to the productions of Milton's Comus that were staged in the 1740s by Baptist Noel, 4th Earl of Gainsborough, at Exton Hall, his country seat in the East Midlands of England.
The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Ads has achieved a level of recognition and celebrity within the world of classical music today that is almost unmatched.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976.
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.
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.
The first biography of Richard D'Oyly Carte, this is a critical survey of the career of the impresario whose ambitions went beyond the famous partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was one of Britain's leading composers: his music is frequently performed throughout Europe, the United States (where he lived and worked) and Japan.
Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment, both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and politics or ideology in this period and on the question of longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics.
Opera has been performed in Australia for more than two hundred years, yet none of the operas written before the Second World War have become part of the repertoire.
Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688-89.
In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture.
