In Search Of Opera

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-12-25
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781400866731

Get Book

In Search of Opera by Carolyn Abbate Pdf

In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being. Weaving between opera's "facts of life" and a series of works including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

Author : Andrew Killick
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2010-07-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780824860806

Get Book

In Search of Korean Traditional Opera by Andrew Killick Pdf

This is the first book on Korean opera in a language other than Korean. Its subject is ch’angguk, a form of musical theater that has developed over the last hundred years from the older narrative singing tradition of p’ansori. Andrew Killick examines the history and current practice of ch’angguk as an ongoing attempt to invent a traditional Korean opera form to compare with those of neighboring China and Japan. In this, the work addresses a growing interest within the fields of ethnomusicology and Asian studies in the adaptation of traditional arts to conditions in the modern world. Ch’angguk presents an intriguing case in that, unlike the "invented traditions" described in Hobsbawm and Ranger's influential book that were firmly established within a few years of their invention, ch’angguk remains in a marginal position relative to recognized traditional art forms such as South Korea’s "Important Intangible Cultural Properties" after more than a century. Performers, writers, directors, and historians have looked for ways to make the genre more traditional, including looking outside Korea for comparisons with traditional theater forms in other countries and for recognition of ch’angguk as a national art form by international audiences. For the benefit of readers who have not seen ch’angguk performed, the author begins with a detailed description of a typical performance, illustrated with photographs and musical examples, followed by a history of the genre—from its still disputed origins in the early twentieth century through a major revival under Japanese colonial rule and the flourishing of an all-female version (yosong kukkuk) after Liberation to the efforts of the National Changgeuk Company and others to establish ch’angguk as Korean traditional opera. Killick concludes with analyses of the stories and music of ch’angguk and a personal view on developing a Korean national theater form for international audiences.

Author : Carolyn Abbate,Roger Parker
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781846147913

Get Book

A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate,Roger Parker Pdf

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera's social, political and literary background, its economic cicumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions that have always sustained and enlivened opera. Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were once opera's life-blood - have shrunk to a tiny minority, have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire. Yet the book's final message is one of celebration. Even if the majority of opera's most popular and enduring works were written in what is now a remote European past, in circumstances very different from our own, and the viability of contemporary opera is ever more in question, opera as an art form remains extraordinarily buoyant and challenging. It continues to transform people physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and to articulate human experience in ways no other art form can match.

Author : Jehoash Hirshberg
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Kings and rulers in opera
ISBN : 2503577393

Get Book

Opera in Search of a Just Ruler for a Unified Italy by Jehoash Hirshberg Pdf

A pre-condition for the selection of the case studies was that they elicited at least "successo di stima" in more than one city, and that they were favourbly judged by the critics, most importantly by Filippo Filippi. The use of musical forms in the service of drama, most importantly "La Solita Forma", was of paramount importance and will be emphasized in the case studies and supported by the many musical examples from the unjustly forgotten operas. - Jehoash Hirshberg is Professor Emeritus at the Musicology Department, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His research fields have included the music of the 14th century, the Italian solo concerto at the time of Vivaldi, with a joint book with Simon McVeigh. In the field of and history of Israeli art music he published "Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880-1948" (OUP, 1995)

Author : Fred Plotkin
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2013-07-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781401306007

Get Book

Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin Pdf

Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you. Opera 101 is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover--a clear, friendly, and truly complete handbook to learning how to listen to opera, whether on the radio, on recordings, or live at the opera house. Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher about opera who for many years was performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces the reader (whatever his or her level of musical knowledge) to all the elements that make up opera, including: A brief, entertaining history of opera; An explanation of key operatic concepts, from vocal types to musical conventions; Hints on the best way to approach the first opera you attend and how to best understand what is happening both offstage and on; Lists of recommended books and recordings, and the most complete traveler's guide to opera houses around the world. The major part of Opera 101 is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute analysis of eleven key operas, ranging from Verdi's thunderous masterpiece Rigoletto and Puccini's electrifying Tosca through works by Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, to the psychological complexities of Richard Strauss's Elektra. Once you have completed Opera 101, you will be prepared to see and hear any opera you encounter, thanks to this book's unprecedentedly detailed and enjoyable method of revealing the riches of opera.

Author : Ellen Rosand
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 712 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2007-10-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780520254268

Get Book

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice by Ellen Rosand Pdf

"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1996-04-21
Category : Music
ISBN : 0691026084

Get Book

Unsung Voices by Carolyn Abbate Pdf

This work looks at the "voices" that speak to us through 19th-century classical music and opera. It proposes interpretive strategies that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, celebrating musical gestures often marginalized by conventional musical analysis.

Author : Anastasia Belina-Johnson,Derek B. Scott
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781317039556

Get Book

The Business of Opera by Anastasia Belina-Johnson,Derek B. Scott Pdf

The study of the business of opera has taken on new importance in the present harsh economic climate for the arts. This book presents research that sheds new light on a range of aspects concerning marketing, audience development, promotion, arts administration and economic issues that beset professionals working in the opera world. The editors' aim has been to assemble a coherent collection of essays that engage with a single theme (business), but differ in topic and critical perspective. The collection is distinguished by its concern with the business of opera here and now in a globalized market. This includes newly commissioned operas, sponsorship, state funding, and production and marketing of historic operas in the twenty-first century.

Author : Guy A. Marco
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 655 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2002-05-03
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781135578015

Get Book

Opera by Guy A. Marco Pdf

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Author : David Trippett,Benjamin Walton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2019-08-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781107111257

Get Book

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination by David Trippett,Benjamin Walton Pdf

Explores the rich and varied interactions between nineteenth-century science and the world of opera for the first time.

Author : Yayoi Uno Everett
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2015-11-30
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780253018052

Get Book

Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera by Yayoi Uno Everett Pdf

Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj i ek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.

Author : Naomi Andre
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2018-05-04
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780252050619

Get Book

Black Opera by Naomi Andre Pdf

From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemmings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

Author : Piero Weiss
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 0195116380

Get Book

Opera by Piero Weiss Pdf

In Opera: A History in Documents, Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo, to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and to Bertolt Brecht's writing desk, among many other landmarks in opera's history. Weiss expertly guides students, providing highly accessible headnotes to each selection that both contextualize the excerpts and position them within the broader historical narrative. In addition, he offers original translations of more than half of the selections in the book, many of which appear here in English for the first time. Stage settings, costumes, portraits, contemporary playbills, and other illustrations enliven the text and help to recreate the feel of the era under discussion. Opera: A History in Documents is an intrinsically lively text that will enrich college courses on opera and delight any music-loving reader.

Author : Jane Rosenberg,Luciano Pavarotti
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1996-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0500278733

Get Book

Sing Me a Story by Jane Rosenberg,Luciano Pavarotti Pdf

An illustrated retelling of the plots of fifteen well-known operas.

Author : Gunnel Bergström
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Affektlära
ISBN : 9186434225

Get Book

In Search of Meaning in Opera by Gunnel Bergström Pdf