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This volume brings together ten essays focusing on the diversity of operatic institutions, their protagonists, and historical fortunes in Europe from 1730 to 1917. Its aim is not to understand operatic institutions as locally distinct and isolated organizations, but rather to perceive them as a part of a historically fluctuating, transnational network: a network that was shaped among other things by individual professionals and groups in the opera business (and beyond), as well as by specific socio-cultural and political surroundings. The volume offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics, including networks of cultural exchange, singers as agents in shaping institutional structures, and the influence of socio-cultural, diplomatic, and political factors on operatic production across international borders.
In the 18th century Italian theatre and its artists became vital to Russian rulers, who employed Italian musico-dramatic works to advance their political agendas and emphasize Russia’s cultural uniqueness and its cosmopolitan character. Innumerable playwrights and composers, actors and singers were active at the Russian court. Usually considered at best peripheral to Europe, the faraway Russian Empire represents a particularly powerful example of the mobility of theatre agents and the circulation of artistic practices. This book sets a new regional accent on imperial Russia, thus mitigating the traditional historiographical emphasis on Western Europe, and adopts a transnational approach to...
This handbook tackles the understudied relationship between music and comedy cinema by analysing the nature, perception, and function of music from fresh perspectives. Its approach is not only multidisciplinary, but also interdisciplinary in its close examination of how music and other cinematic devices interact in the creation of comedy. The volume addresses gender representation, national identities, stylistic strategies, and employs inputs from cultural studies, musicology, music theory, psychology, cognitivism, semiotics, formal and stylistic film analysis, and psychoanalysis. It is organised in four sections: general introductions, theoretical investigations, music and comedy within national cinemas, and exemplary case studies of films or authors.
The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer's works. Genealogies of Music and Memory asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments. Received opinion has Hector Berlioz as the sole guardian of the Gluckian flame from the 1820s onwards, and responsible -- together with the soprano Pauline Viardot -- for the 'reviv...
This volume is dedicated to the musico-literary oeuvre of Walter Bernhart, professor of English literature at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz/Austria and pioneer in the field of intermedial relations between literature and other arts and media. It renders accessible a wide variety of texts which are sometimes no longer easily retrievable. The 37 texts collected here in chronological order span the period from 1985 to 2013 and thematically range from contributions to opera programmes and the discussion of musical aspects of Romantic and modernist poetry to inquiries into individual operas and composers as well as into theoretical aspects of word and music relations (e. g. the ways of setting poetry to music, musico-literary ‘comparative poetics’, the concept of ‘genre’ in music and literature, iconicity in both media, their narrative as well as metareferential and illusionist capacities). The volume is of relevance to literary scholars and musicologists but also to all those with an interest in intermediality studies in general and in the relations between literature and music in particular.
London, 1820. The British capital is a metropolis that overwhelms dwellers and visitors alike with constant exposure to all kinds of sensory stimulation. Over the next two decades, the city’s tumult will reach new heights: as population expansion places different classes in dangerous proximity and ideas of political and social reform linger in the air, London begins to undergo enormous infrastructure change that will alter it forever. It is the London of this period that editors Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford pinpoint in this book, which chooses one broad musical category—voice—and engages with it through essays on music of the streets, theaters, opera houses, and concert halls; on ...
Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is a collection of fifteen essays dealing with ‘iconic’ film composers who, perhaps to the surprise of many fans of film music, nevertheless maintained lifelong careers as composers for the concert hall. Featured composers include Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Leonard Rosenman, and Ennio Morricone. Progressing in chronological order, the chapters offer accounts of the various composers’ concert-hall careers and descriptions of their concert-hall styles. Each chapter compares the composer’s music for films with his or her music for the concert hall, and speculates as to how music in one arena might have affected music in the other. For each composer discussed in the book, complete filmographies and complete works lists are included as appendices. Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is accessible for scholars, researchers, and general readers with an interest in film music and concert music.
This collection of essays is the first book-length study of music history and cosmopolitanism, and is informed by arguments that culture and identity do not have to be viewed as primarily located in the context of nationalist narratives. Rather than trying to distinguish between a true cosmopolitanism and a false cosmopolitanism, the book presents studies that deepen understanding of the heritage of this concept – the various ways in which the term has been used to describe a wide range of activity and social outlooks. It ranges over a two hundred-year period, and more than a dozen countries, revealing how musicians and audiences have responded to a common humanity by embracing culture beyond regional or national boundaries. Among the various topics investigated are: musical cosmopolitanism among composers in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire; cosmopolitan popular music historiography; cosmopolitan musical entrepreneurs; and musical cosmopolitanism in the metropolises of New York and Shanghai.
In Music and Cosmopolitanism, Cristina Magaldi examines music making in a past globalized world. This volume focuses on one city, Rio de Janeiro, and how it became part of a larger world through music and performance. Magaldi describes a process of creating connections beyond national borders, one that is familiar to contemporary city residents, but which was already dominant at the turn of the 20th century, as new technological developments led to alternative ways of making and experiencing music.
Anlässlich ihres 300. Geburtstages steht Anna Maria Mozart, geb. Pertl (1720–1778) - die Mutter der Geschwister Maria Anna und Wolfgang Amadé Mozart - im Mittelpunkt dieses Sammelbandes. Die Beiträge beschäftigen sich mit ihrer Biographie, ihrer Bildung, ihrer Darstellung in Bildern sowie mit ihrer Rezeption durch die Mozart-Biographik. Behandelt wird zudem die wichtige soziale Rolle von Musiker:innen-Müttern im 18. Jahrhundert. Anhand von ausgewählten Biographien, die exemplarisch das kulturelle Handeln von Frauen in Musiker:innen-Familien beleuchten, werden auch neue Aspekte des Lebens und Wirkens von Anna Maria Mozart erschlossen. Die hier vorgestellten Ergebnisse zeigen, dass diese Frau auf die Entwicklung ihres berühmten Sohnes Wolfgang Amadé doch einen stärkeren Einfluss hatte, als bislang angenommen.