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The celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death. But nothing so horrific and violent as that of conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, has to step behind the lights into the bitchy world of opera to investigate.
Renaissance Europe, with its humanistic impulse, may have brought the cathedral-building Middle Ages to an end, but it rechanneled the religious fervor of the old era into a new cult, the cult of opera, whose grandiose rites demanded theatres as monumental and as prominently placed as any cathedral ever built. In Opera Houses of the World the musicologist Thierry Beauvert narrates in text and glorious image alike, the story of those fabulous buildings - the princes of the blood or of commerce who commissioned them, the architects who designed and decorated them, the composers who wrote for them, the golden-voiced singers who performed on their stages, and even the audiences who still attend performances like worshippers in sacred temples.
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This title is a part of the series “Schwung”; Critical Curating and Aesthetic Management for Art, Business and Politics. Conventional wisdom holds that the performing arts, due to the economic nature of the sector, are condemned to a state of permanent financial crisis. However, increasingly frequent information about the fiscal troubles of several opera houses has also led to questions about the soundness of the strategies adopted by these organizations, and about the administrative abilities of their general managers. The case narrated here (La Fenice, Venice’s main opera theater), represents a successful case in which, still inside the borders of a subsidized cultural production, a ...
'Glittering, entertaining' Sunday Times A beguiling portrait of the city of Venice from the bestselling author of the true crime classic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Beneath the exquisite facade of the world's most beautiful historic city, scandal, corruption and venality are rampant. Venice and its eccentric locals come to life in the exquisite storytelling of John Berendt. Ezra Pound and his mistress, Olga; poet Mario Stefani; the Rat Man of Treviso; or Mario Moro - self-styled carabiniere, fireman, soldier or airman, depending on the day of the week. City of Falling Angels is a mischievous, charming and compelling portrait of a beguiling city and its people. 'Fascinating, fantastic' Observer
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.
How does one do justice to a building that is far more than its constituent materials, a building that is a vessel of myth, an embodiment of the dreams and legends of a city and a culture? The living reputation of the Gran Teatro La Fenice was assured from its opening in 1792. It was destined to be exceptional. Unbelievably ornate, an artwork in its own right, it has played host to the widest possible range of creative activity. From the operas of Verdi and Rossini to the postmodern dance theatre of Pina Bausch, with two centuries of music along the way, it has seen it all and made it great. And the huge fire of 1996 that levelled the building once again is just another step on the journey. The Phoenix will rise again, as before. And this volume, magnificent itself, explains how and why. It offers a full history of the Gran Teatro in words and pictures, with stills from the great productions, set designs, elevations, stories of the celebrities, singers and composers, alongside stunningly reproduced old engravings and up to the minute reportage on the recent blaze. A book world that will endure.
Learn about some of the most famous landmarks in the city of Venice in this colorful pop-up book.
Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.