Unsettling Opera

Unsettling Opera Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Unsettling Opera book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

Unsettling Opera

David J. Levin
Unsettling Opera Book PDF

Author : David J. Levin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2008-11-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780226475257

Get Book

Unsettling Opera by David J. Levin Pdf

What happens when operas that are comfortably ensconced in the canon are thoroughly rethought and radically recast on stage? What does a staging do to our understanding of an opera, and of opera generally? While a stage production can disrupt a work that was thought to be established, David J. Levin here argues that the genre of opera is itself unsettled, and that the performance of operas, at its best, clarifies this condition by bringing opera’s restlessness and volatility to life. Unsettling Opera explores a variety of fields, considering questions of operatic textuality, dramaturgical practice, and performance theory. Levin opens with a brief history of opera production, opera studies, and dramatic composition, and goes on to consider in detail various productions of the works of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Ultimately, the book seeks to initiate a dialogue between scholars of music, literature, and performance by addressing questions raised in each field in a manner that influences them all.

Rape at the Opera

Margaret Cormier
Rape at the Opera Book PDF

Author : Margaret Cormier
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2024-01-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780472903634

Get Book

Rape at the Opera by Margaret Cormier Pdf

The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas. When performed uncritically, the misogyny, racism, and other ideologies present in many of these works clash with modern sensibilities. In Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier argues that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage. Where some directors explicitly respond to contemporary dialogues about sexual violence, others utilize sexual violence as a surefire way to titillate, to shock, and to generate press for a new production. Drawing on archival footage as well as attendance at live events, Cormier analyzes productions of canonic operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, La forza del destino, Un ballo in maschera, Salome, and Turandot. In doing so, Cormier highlights the dynamism of twenty-first-century opera performance practice with regard to sexual violence, establishes methods to evaluate representations of sexual violence on the opera stage, and reframes the primary responsibility of opera critics and creators as being not to opera composers and librettists but to the public.

Brecht at the Opera

Joy H. Calico
Brecht at the Opera Book PDF

Author : Joy H. Calico
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2023-09-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780520942813

Get Book

Brecht at the Opera by Joy H. Calico Pdf

From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht’s writings. Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Opera Acts

Karen Henson
Opera Acts Book PDF

Author : Karen Henson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2015-01-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781107004269

Get Book

Opera Acts by Karen Henson Pdf

Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera

Wendy Heller,Eleonora Stoppino
Performing Homer The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera Book PDF

Author : Wendy Heller,Eleonora Stoppino
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2019-07-23
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781317082415

Get Book

Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera by Wendy Heller,Eleonora Stoppino Pdf

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.

Staging Voice

Michal Grover-Friedlander
Staging Voice Book PDF

Author : Michal Grover-Friedlander
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2021-12-24
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781000529074

Get Book

Staging Voice by Michal Grover-Friedlander Pdf

Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance. This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

Curating Opera

Stephen Mould
Curating Opera Book PDF

Author : Stephen Mould
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2021-02-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781000338607

Get Book

Curating Opera by Stephen Mould Pdf

Curation as a concept and a catchword in modern parlance has, over recent decades, become deeply ingrained in modern culture. The purpose of this study is to explore the curatorial forces at work within the modern opera house and to examine the functionaries and processes that guide them. In turn, comparisons are made with the workings of the traditional art museum, where artworks are studied, preserved, restored, displayed and contextualised – processes which are also present in the opera house. Curatorial roles in each institution are identified and described, and the role of the celebrity art curator is compared with that of the modern stage director, who has acquired previously undreamt-of licence to interrogate operatic works, overlaying them with new concepts and levels of meaning in order to reinvent and redefine the operatic repertoire for contemporary needs. A point of coalescence between the opera house and the art museum is identified, with the transformation, towards the end of the nineteenth century, of the opera house into the operatic museum. Curatorial practices in the opera house are examined, and further communalities and synergies in the way that ‘works’ are defined in each institution are explored. This study also considers the so-called ‘birth’ of opera around the start of the seventeenth century, with reference to the near-contemporary rise of the modern art museum, outlining operatic practice and performance history over the last 400 years in order to identify the curatorial practices that have historically been employed in the maintenance and development of the repertoire. This examination of the forces of curation within the modern opera house will highlight aspects of authenticity, authorial intent, preservation, restoration and historically informed performance practice.

The Oxford Handbook of Opera

Helen M. Greenwald
The Oxford Handbook of Opera Book PDF

Author : Helen M. Greenwald
Publisher : Oxford Handbooks
Page : 1217 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780195335538

Get Book

The Oxford Handbook of Opera by Helen M. Greenwald Pdf

Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.

Situating Opera

Herbert Lindenberger
Situating Opera Book PDF

Author : Herbert Lindenberger
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2010-10-28
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781139492584

Get Book

Situating Opera by Herbert Lindenberger Pdf

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera

Anthony R. DelDonna,Pierpaolo Polzonetti
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Opera Book PDF

Author : Anthony R. DelDonna,Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2009-06-25
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781139828178

Get Book

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera by Anthony R. DelDonna,Pierpaolo Polzonetti Pdf

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.

The Business of Opera

Anastasia Belina-Johnson,Derek B. Scott
The Business of Opera Book PDF

Author : Anastasia Belina-Johnson,Derek B. Scott
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781317039549

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.

Opera as Art

Paul Thom
Opera as Art Book PDF

Author : Paul Thom
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2022-09-21
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781666914245

Get Book

Opera as Art by Paul Thom Pdf

Paul Thom argues that opera is a set of practices framed by the concepts of work, interpretation, performance, and art. His argument is that operatic works have the potential to be art, but so do operatic productions, independently of their value as interpretations of the works they stage.

Musicality in Theatre

David Roesner
Musicality in Theatre Book PDF

Author : David Roesner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781317091332

Get Book

Musicality in Theatre by David Roesner Pdf

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of ‘musicality’ in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

Performing Opera

Michael Ewans
Performing Opera Book PDF

Author : Michael Ewans
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2016-02-25
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781474239097

Get Book

Performing Opera by Michael Ewans Pdf

In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater

Nina Penner
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater Book PDF

Author : Nina Penner
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780253052421

Get Book

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater by Nina Penner Pdf

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.