Kategoria BISAC: Music >> Genres & Styles - Opera

Operas in English have a long, rich, and varied history encompassing everything from the English masques of the 17th century to today's crossover music dramas such as "Harvey Milk" and "Rent." This book covers in detail more than 3,500 English-texted operas by composers including Purcell, Handel, Britten, Bernstein, and Musgrave. Most were born in English-speaking countries, but the list also includes such composers as Weill (his American stage works) and Henze (his operas with dual English-German texts). The work provides specific information not accessible in the usual sources, such as...

Here for the first time are in-depth profiles of 139 major opera companies from around the globe, representing 35 countries, from Argentina to Yugoslavia, and including little-known information on opera in the People's Republic of China, Israel, Japan, the Republic of South Africa, and Turkey. Briefly noted in an appendix are an additional 24 companies from ten countries, three of them not included in the main section.

The profiles provide directory and access information, a survey of the company's history, and, wherever possible, a chronological listing of directors and managers, and a...

"Opera Mediagraphy" lists operas released as motion pictures, both as theatrical feature films on 35mm film and educational films on 16mm film and videorecordings, including the VHS videotape format and optical video laser disc, though restricted to those that have been released in the United States in the American television standard video called NTSC (National Television Standards Committee). In addition to all possible information available concerning each opera, citations to reviews are included from over twenty-two sources ranging from opera journals to video review periodicals to...

This literary and critical approach to Wagner's "Ring" provides an original interpretation of the "Ring" tetralogy and challenges the standard political analyses of the work. The "Ring" is examined in the tradition of the Romantic drama as a reworking of Greek tragedy as theoretically expressed in the second part of "Oper und Drama." In the "Ring," using myth as a metaphor for history presents a paradoxical world. The innertextual reflection that Wotan performs in his monologue causes the "Ring" to self-destruct from within. He actually dismantles or deconstructs the text of the "Ring."...

The early 19th century was a period of acute transition in operatic tradition and style, when time-honored 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 in operatic plot structures as well; the happy resolution of the 18th century twisted into a tragic 19th-century finale with the death of the helpless and innocent heroine and frequently her tenor hero along with her. Female voices which formerly...

In this captivating work, Carmen Trammell Skaggs examines the discourse of opera -- both the art form and the social institution -- in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Through the lens of opera, she maintains, major American writers -- including Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton -- captured the transformations of a rapidly changing American literary landscape. Although they turned to opera for different reasons, they all saw a twofold function in the art form: a means of expressing a...

The futurist opera Victory Over the Sun--written by Aleksei Kruchenykh and first performed in St. Petersburg in December 1913--was central to the Russian avant-garde, important for its libretto, its fragmentary, modernistic score, and its innovative sets and costumes. This book features an excellent translation of the text, accompanied by a number of essays from international contributors such as Laurence Senelick and John E. Bowlt that offer new insights into the practice and history of Russian theater in the first half of the twentieth century.

Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at the Paris Opera (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely...