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In Search of Opera
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 309

In Search of Opera

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 unca...

Unsung Voices
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 305

Unsung Voices

Who "speaks" to us in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that "sings" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that "de-center" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.

A History of Opera
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 809

A History of Opera

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2012-11-01
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

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. Cen...

Musicology and Difference
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 367

Musicology and Difference

Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most challenging voices in musicology today on a question of importance to all the humanistic disciplines.

Music and Discourse
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 296

Music and Discourse

Series statement on p. [4] of cover, paperback edition.

Music and the Ineffable
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 201

Music and the Ineffable

The classic work on the philosophy of music—now available in English to a new generation of readers Vladimir Jankélévitch left behind a remarkable body of work steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jankélévitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sus...

Analyzing Opera
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 468

Analyzing Opera

Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner explores the latest developments in opera analysis by considering, side by side, the works of the two greatest opera composers of the nineteenth century. Although the juxtaposition is not new, comparative studies have tended to view these masters as radically different both as musicians and as musical dramatists. Wagner and his "symphonic opera" set against Verdi "the melodist" is one of many familiar antitheses, and it serves to highlight the particular terms from which comparisons are often made. In this book some of the leading and most innovative music scholars challenge this view, suggesting that as we become more distant from the nineteenth century, we...

Reading Opera
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 363

Reading Opera

"Libretto-bashing has a distinguished tradition in the blood sport of opera," writes Arthur Groos in the introduction to this broad survey of critical approaches to that much-maligned genre. To examine, and to challenge, the long-standing prejudice against libretti and the scholarly tradition that has, until recently, reiterated it, Groos and Roger Parker have commissioned thirteen stimulating essays by musicologists, literary critics, and historians. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates that libretti are now very much within the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship. Libretti pose questions of intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history. They invite a broad ...

Unsung Voices
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 308

Unsung Voices

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.

Vocal Apparitions
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 201

Vocal Apparitions

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc an...