Kategoria BISAC: Music >> Genres & Styles - Opera

Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer and one of the few artists who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden. His trailblazing career carved the way for a host of African American artists, including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. Performing the African American spirituals he was raised on, Hayes's voice was marked with a unique sonority which easily navigated French, German, and Italian art songs. A multiculturalist both on...

One of the foremost composers of the French Baroque operatic tradition, Rameau is often cited for his struggle to steer lyric tragedy away from its strict Lullian form, inspired by spoken tragedy, and toward a more expressive musical style. In this fresh exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music. Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with...

While undergoing routine surgery to remove a benign tumor, Ruby Elzy died. She was only thirty-five. Had she lived, she would have been one of the first black artists to appear in grand opera.

Although now in the shadows, she was a shining star in her day. She entertained Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. She was Paul Robeson's leading lady in the movie version of The Emperor Jones. She co-starred in Birth of the Blues opposite Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. She sang at Harlem's Apollo Theater and in the Hollywood Bowl. Her remarkable soprano voice was known to millions...

Jean-Baptiste Lully is perhaps best known in the history of music as the founder of French opera. Although Italian-born himself, he created a form of opera so suited to French tastes and needs that it alone, among the attempts of various other nations at operatic forms of their own, was able to resist domination by Italian opera and to maintain its individual identity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The impress he made upon French music was enormous, and it affected every musical medium of his day. Evidence of his influence in a field as remote from his own as the...