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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...
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 ...
Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain addresses operatic “experiences” outside the opera houses of Britain during the nineteenth century. The essays adopt a variety of perspectives exploring the processes through which opera and ideas about opera were cultivated and disseminated, by examining opera-related matters in publication and performance, in both musical and non-musical genres, outside the traditional approaches to transmission of operatic works and associated concepts. As a group, they exemplify the broad array of questions to be grappled with in seeking to identify commonalities that might shed light in new and imaginative ways on the experiences ...
This study is the first to explore the significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian opera during the nineteenth century. Each chapter investigates this practice from varying perspectives and through the experiences of some of the century's most famous prima donnas.
Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narrative of 19th and early 20th century opera. This book shines a light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled doomed women onstage before an audience.
El amor brujo (trans. "Love, the Magician") is a theater work by the Spanish classical composer Manuel de Falla. It showcases flamenco, the music of the Gitanos who traditionally form Spain's underclass. When it premiered in Spain in 1915, it proved controversial: some Spanish critics applauded Falla for celebrating the music of a marginalized culture while others attacked his mixing of classical and popular idioms. Since then, El amor brujo has intrigued arrangers and artists. It has been repeatedly reshaped, rearranged, and repackaged, either by Falla himself or by artists ranging from the concert pianist Artur Rubinstein to the super-showman Liberace or to various jazz and pop arrangers. El amor brujo has also figured in soundtracks, whether frothy movie musicals from the 1940s, somber accounts of recent Spanish history, or films on anti-Black racism, including one by Spike Lee. In Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo, author Carol A. Hess explores the ways in which music, class, and race are intertwined in this composition's unusually rich history.
What IS opera? Contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Opera respond to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. 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. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: Words, Music, and Meaning; Performance and Production; Opera and Society; and Transmission and Reception. Individual essays engage with repertoire from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Meyerbeer to Strauss, Henze, and Adams in stu...
Leading scholars re-evaluate the opposition between Beethoven and Rossini, the great symbolic duo of early nineteenth-century music.
While the musical culture of the British Isles in the 'long nineteenth century' has been reclaimed from obscurity by musicologists in the last thirty years, appraisal of operatic culture in the latter part of this period has remained largely elusive. Paul Rodmell argues that there were far more opportunities for composers, performers and audiences than one might expect, an assertion demonstrated by the fact that over one hundred serious operas by British composers were premiered between 1875 and 1918. Rodmell examines the nature of operatic culture in the British Isles during this period, looking at the way in which opera was produced and 'consumed' by companies and audiences, the repertory ...
Linguistics for Singers: An Introduction is a textbook and manual that provides singers with a foundation in linguistic features of four major singing languages—English, Italian, French, and German—and shows how these features can be used to inform vocal performance and interpretation. Going beyond the basics of lyric diction, a grounding in linguistics enables student musicians to understand language holistically and more fully comprehend the music they are learning. The comparative approach to four common languages allows readers to readily grasp similarities and apply principles across vocal repertoire. Beginning with the sounds of a language and gradually moving up through larger levels of linguistic structure, from words to full texts, the chapters illustrate concepts using real examples from art songs and opera. The clear explanations enable readers new to linguistics to connect these concepts with their own musical practice. Designed for flexible use in courses on language and singing, lyric diction, repertoire studies, and collaborative piano, this book provides a vital resource for singers, vocal instructors, and conductors.