This collection of essays, presented by an internationally known team of scholars, explores the world of Vienna and the development of opera buffa in the second half of the eighteenth century. Among the topics explored are the relationship of Viennese opera buffa to French theater; Mozart and eighteenth century comedy; gender, nature and bourgeois society on Mozart's buffa stage; as well as close examinations of key works such as Don Giovanni and Figaro.

The transformation of Vienna and the Habsburg Empire at the end of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the development of a new musical genre, Viennese operetta, and no composer was better suited than Johann Strauss to express his native city's pride and anxiety during this period. Camille Crittenden provides an overview of Viennese operetta, then takes Strauss' works as a series of case studies in the interaction between stage works and audience. The book also examines Strauss' role as national icon during his lifetime and throughout the twentieth century.

German opera from its primitive origins up to Wagner is the subject of this wide-ranging history, the only one of its kind in any language. It traces the growth of the humble Singspiel into a vehicle for the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, together with the persistent attempts at German Grand Opera. The many operas studied are placed in their historical, social and theatrical context, and attention is paid to the literary, artistic and philosophical ideas that made them part of the country's intellectual history.

This book explores the cultural and commercial life of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London. Through primary sources, many analyzed for the first time, Ian Woodfield examines such issues as finances, recruitment policy, handling of singers and composers, links with Paris and Italy, and the role of women in opera management. These key topics are also placed within the context of a dispute between two of the most important managers of the day, Frances Brooke and David Garrick, and the major venues of the time: the King's Theatre and its rivals Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

This is a comprehensive critical study of the nineteenth-century French grand opera La Juive, by Halevy.

German opera from its primitive origins up to Wagner is the subject of this wide-ranging history, the only one of its kind in any language. It traces the growth of the humble Singspiel into a vehicle for the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, together with the persistent attempts at German Grand Opera. The many operas studied are placed in their historical, social and theatrical context, and attention is paid to the literary, artistic and philosophical ideas that made them part of the country's intellectual history.

This collection of essays, presented by an internationally known team of scholars, explores the world of Vienna and the development of opera buffa in the second half of the eighteenth century. Among the topics explored are the relationship of Viennese opera buffa to French theater; Mozart and eighteenth century comedy; gender, nature and bourgeois society on Mozart's buffa stage; as well as close examinations of key works such as Don Giovanni and Figaro.

Cosi fan tutte is widely regarded as Mozart's most enigmatic opera with Lorenzo Da Ponte's most erudite text. Edmund Goehring presents a new perspective on the relationships between text and tone in the opera, the tension between comedy and philosophy as well as its representation in stage works, and the pastoral mode. Goehring's argument is sustained by the detailed analysis of primary sources (many of which are little known), and is richly illustrated with musical examples.

This book is concerned not so much with the 'prima donna' as with prime donne: a group of working artists (sometimes famous but more often relativelyunknown and now long forgotten) and the circumstances of their professional lives. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house - the social, cultural and political framing that shaped individual experience, artistic endeavour and audience reception. Rutherford addresses questions such as the multiple discourses on the image of the...

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 advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's...