Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of 17th-century England, despite the fact that it was originally composed not for the public theatre but for a private girls' school in Chelsea and takes little more than an hour to perform. Ellen Harris examines the work, s historical position in the Restoration theatre, and shows that, far from being an operatic anomaly, it was deeply rooted in 17th-century English theatrical and music traditions. Her book summarises the cultural climate in which Dido and Aeneas was composed, surveying the choice of subject matter and...
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of 17th-century England, despite the fact that it was originally composed not fo...
Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In Handel as Orpheus, the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.
The cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723--from the time Handel left his home in Germany, through the years he spent in Florence and Rome, and into the early part of his London career. In this period he lived as a guest in aristocratic homes, and composed these chamber works for his patrons and hosts,...
Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In Handel as Orpheus, the fir...
One document--Handel's will--offers us a narrow window into his personal life. In it, he remembers not only family and close colleagues but also neighborhood friends. In search of the private man behind the public figure, Ellen T. Harris has spent years tracking down the letters, diaries, personal accounts, legal cases, and other documents connected to these bequests. The result is a tightly woven tapestry of London in the first half of the eighteenth century, one that interlaces vibrant descriptions of Handel's music with stories of loyalty, cunning, and betrayal.
With this wholly...
One document--Handel's will--offers us a narrow window into his personal life. In it, he remembers not only family and close colleagues but also ne...
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its global renown, it remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the absolute accuracy of the surviving scores, which date from almost 100 years after the work was written, cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris closely examines the many theories that have been proposed for the opera's origin and chronology, considering the opera both as political allegory and...
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its global renown, it remains c...
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its global renown, it remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the absolute accuracy of the surviving scores, which date from almost 100 years after the work was written, cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris closely examines the many theories that have been proposed for the opera's origin and chronology, considering the opera both as political allegory and...
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its global renown, it remains c...
