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In Dramaturgical Leaves: Essays about Musical Works for the Stage and Queries about the Stage, Its Composers and Performers, the third volume in Janita R. Hall-Swadley’s The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, Liszt heralds his admiration for early nineteenth-century opera and musical stage works. He honors Gluck, the musical prophet, as the cultivator of dramatic truth in the Romantic opera Orpheus, expounds on Beethoven’s harmonic inventions and innovative treatment of form in Fidelio, and argues for the latter’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont as the epitome of music organicism, a complete unity of words and tone. He also comments on Weber’s Euryanthe as offering the most pro...
This work describes in accessible language the technical foundations of the Old Italian School of Singing. It enables the reader to grasp the teachings of the old masters theoretically and practically. The research for this book used not only the old treatises from the 1700's onwards but also firsthand testimonies, biographies and recordings from historical singers. The author systematically takes us through the basic elements of historical singing with practical hints and exercises tested by extensive teaching experience.
Matters of authenticity. Chopin's Polish rhapsody / Ferdinand Gajewski -- Matters folkloric. L'emprunt, facteur de renouvellement musical dans les pays celtiques / Yves Defrance ; Gibbons in the Budapest Zoo : reflections on Hungarian folksong / Virginia James Kidd ; Folklore and reminiscence in Claude Debussy / Virginia Raad -- Matters instrumental. Frédéric Triebert (1813-1878), designer of the modern oboe : newly found archival documents featuring the inventory and auction of his musical instrument enterprise / Tula Giannini ; Marking the accord of instrument and style, 1709-1768 / Sally C. Park -- Matters naval. Jean Cras, the scientist : an explication of his navigational ruler ; Comp...
Giacomo Meyerbeer was once one of the most famous of all opera composers, enjoying into the twentieth century the same universal admiration and performance as a composer like Puccini does today. Through a series of adverse factors, his reputation was seriously damaged with the resurgence of nationalism and the growing ant-Semitism in France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the propagation of a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic, the decline of the bel canto vocal tradition, and the disfavour manifested towards the heroism of French grand opera. All these factors, and especially the ban on his music in Nazi Germany, meant that Meyerbeer’s reputation was seriously overshadowed in ...
'A gentle giant', as the Goncourts called him, Turgenev emerged from the barbarous yet doting rules of a terrible mother, whose cruelties to her serfs are at the heart of his hatred of serfdom. He was saturated in femininity and could not write unless he was in love. When he freed himself from his mother, he became enslaved by the famous Spanish singer, Pauline Viardot, married to a Frenchman. He was heir to vast estates, a convinced Westerner, proud to be both European and deeply Russian, and one of the most civilized men of his time. This is his story.
Twenty great composers of Italian art songs from Scarlatti to Puccini are represented in songs that have been chosen for their appeal to young singers. Musical excerpts studied in Gateway to Italian Diction appear as complete scores.
“During his picaresque, chameleon career, [Da Ponte] was always on the move. Jew and Catholic, priest and womaniser, poet and bankrupt, shopkeeper and university professor, he began his long life in and around Venice and ended it in New York. It is hard to imagine a more flamboyant personal history, a gift to the biographer Anthony Holden, who relishes his subject’s sheer exuberance.” — Lucasta Miller, The Guardian “Lorenzo da Ponte was, at various times, a Catholic priest, a gambler, a philanderer, an entrepreneur, a poet, a friend of Casanova, an enemy of the Venetian state, a teacher, a shopkeeper, a courtier and a troublemaker. The tangled yarn of his life would be worth spinni...
The thrust of these five volumes is contained in their title, London Opera Observ’d. It takes its cue from the numerous texts and volumes which — during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — used the concept of ‘spying’ or ‘observing’ by a narrator, or rambler, as a means of establishing a discourse on aspects of London life. The material in this five-volume reset edition examines opera not simply as a genre of performance, but as a wider topic of comment and debate. The stories that surrounded the Italian opera singers illuminate contemporary British attitudes towards performance, sexuality and national identity. The collection includes only complete, publishe...
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