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Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music
Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic periodÑMahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, PucciniÑregarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank? Why has modernist discourse continued to brand these works as overly sentimental and emotionally self-indulgent? Peter Franklin takes a close and even-handed look at how and why late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War. The styleÕs continuing popularity and its domination of the film music idiom (via work by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and their successors) bring late-romantic music to thousands of listeners who have never set foot in a concert hall. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music sheds new light on these often unfairly disparaged works and explores the historical dimension of their continuing role in the contemporary sound world.
Mimomania
Publisher Description
Puccini's La Bohème
Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? In this book, author Alexandra Wilson traces La Bohème's rise to fame and demonstrates that its success grew steadily through stage performances, recordings, filmed versions and the endorsements of star singers. More recently, popular songs, film soundtracks and musicals that draw on the opera's music and themes added further to its immense cultural impact. This cultural history offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. Wilson argues that La Bohème's approach to realism and its flouting of conventions of the Italian operatic tradition made it strikingly modern for...
Imperial Designs
Imperial Designs is the first text in English to deal comprehensively with the subject of the Italian colonial experience in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent scholarship on both the Liberal and Fascist Italian colonial enterprises centers on the Mediterranean and Northern Africa: expeditions, wars, ultimate occupation of territories, and their effect on Italy. This study looks at three Italian enclaves on the other side of the globe: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. These present both a window into the Italian experience in the Far East and confirmation of imperial policy. Their very presence confirms the rhetoric of conquest. Journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr.; diplomats Salvago Raggi, Varè, and Ciano; various military personnel; and other foreign nationals tell the story through letters and diaries. They all interact with the local metropolitan and rural poor and cultivate a generalized colonial white man’s detachment from their surroundings. A brief summary of the presence of chinoiserie in the Italian imaginary shows how the Celestial Empire has continued to function in the construction of Italian identity as part of the dichotomy between self and other.
Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective
This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.
The Operetta Empire
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life—one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomeno...
Changing the Score
This study seeks to explore the role and significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian operas. Each chapter investigates the art of aria insertion during the nineteenth century from varying perspectives, beginning with an overview of the changing fortunes of the practice, followed by explorations of individual prima donnas and their relationship with particular insertion arias: Carolina Ungher's difficulties in finding a "perfect" aria to introduce into Donizetti's Marino Faliero; Guiditta Pasta's performance of an aria from Pacini's Niobe in a variety of operas, and the subsequent fortunes of that particu...
Song
From one of our most innovative singers, a vibrant history of song stretching from Hildegard von Bingen and Benjamin Britten to Björk “Songs can be intensely personal (whether you hear them or sing them) and none of us would choose the same twelve songs as anyone else. My choices are based on decades of performing experience in many different genres, but I hope they will reveal aspects of our common humanity as the story evolves from the Middle Ages to the present.” In this celebratory account, author and singer John Potter tells the European story of song. The form has captivated audiences and excited performers for centuries, from the music of the troubadours and the Christian liturgy through classical composers such as Bach and Schumann up to Britten, Berio, and the rise of popular music. Choosing twelve key works, Potter offers a personal tour through this vital tradition, from John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” to George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Throughout, he reveals who wrote and sang these joyful masterpieces—and what they mean to singers and audiences today.
London Voices, 1820–1840
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 ...
