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Just twenty-six when the electrifying premiere of his Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome catapulted the impoverished musician into sudden fame and fortune, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) went on to write fifteen more operas, including L'Amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Iris, Parisina, and Il Piccolo Marat. With privileged access to extensive primary sources, including Mascagni's 4,200 letters to Anna Lolli, his mistress for more than three decades, author Alan Mallach provides a compelling portrait of a flamboyant, combative, and emotional man who was passionately devoted to the Italian opera tradition and committed to innovation in musical language and dramatic form. Deftly co...
A transnational history of the performance, reception, translation, adaptation and appropriation of Bizet's Carmen from 1875 to 1945. This volume explores how Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe, and how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse contexts.
The first full-length study of the last great era of Italian opera
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.
Leoncavallo: Life and Works is the first fully documented biography of the beloved and popular composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857-1919), whose credits include Pagliacci and the operatic works Chatterton, Der Roland von Berlin, Zazà, Maïa, Zingari, La bohème, and the incomplete trilogy Crepusculum. Author Konrad Dryden has amassed material from hundreds of unpublished letters and photographs, creating the most complete portrait of the composer to date. This book examines various facets of Leoncavallo's history: from his youth as the son of the Naples' judge who presided over the murder trial on which Pagliacci was based to his studies with the poet Giosuè Carducci, and from his sojourn i...
How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the Middle Ages. Feminist musicologies have already dealt extensively with music and gender, from the 'phallocentric' tendencies of the Western tradition, to the explicit marginalization of women from that tradition. This book builds on that work by turning feminist critical approaches towards the production, rhetorical engagement and subversion of mascul...
On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.
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.