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This book shows how the seemingly immutable Tuscan landscape was largely shaped by modern conflicts over economic resources and cultural meanings.
Opera has always been controversial, not only because of how vastly expensive it is to produce. It has historically been a vital and complex mixture of high art and commerce, socially elite and popular or middle-class, the new and the increasingly old. When a city wants a new landmark building, an opera house is very often the solution: why should this still be the case? The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by looking at how it evolved from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most arthritically canonic art forms still in existence. This new collection addresses questions that are key to opera's pa...
Prologue : Verdi and his audience -- War -- Prayer -- Romance -- Sexuality -- Marriage -- Death -- Laughter.
The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of expert scholars has worked together to investigate the Italian operatic tradition in its entirety, rather than limiting its focus to individual eras or major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon-resulting in the sort of panoramic view critical to a deep and fruitful understanding of the art. Opera on Stage, the second book of this multi-volume work to be published in English-in an expanded and updated version-focuses on staging and vie...
"Do look after my music!" Irene Wienawska Polowski exclaimed before her death in 1932. And from the urgency of that sentiment the authors here have taken their cue to reveal and "look after" the previously neglected contributions of women throughout the history of Western art music. The first work of its kind, Women Making Music presents biographies of outstanding performers and composers, as well as analyses of women musicians as a class, and provides examples of music from all periods including medieval chant, Renaissance song, Baroque opera, German lieder, and twentieth-century composition. Unlike most standard historical surveys, the book not only sheds light upon the musical achievements of women, it also illuminates the historical contexts that shaped and defined those achievements.
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This book addresses the interplay between collaboration and resistance during the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era in the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, renamed States of Parma in 1802 and Department of Taro in 1808. Considered no more than a docile backwater in 1796, the country exploded in violent rebellion at the end of 1805, to the astonishment of the French imperial establishment and of Napoleon himself. Yet, the insurgency – duly suppressed by the French military – did not beget further confrontation. French administrators determined to demonstrate that the empire was a force for good and local citizens compelled to reassess their circumstances realistically settled for cooperation in the form of protracted give and take arrangements. In recounting the events, this book highlights local agency and the myriad ways Parma’s population harnessed the power of empire to shape what eventually became the Napoleonic legacy in the region.
Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.
How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should say -- or how? French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian ope...