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The Oxford Dictionary of Opera

La Scala, Luciano Pavarotti, Sweeney Todd, Maria Callas, Le Nozze di Figaro. These are just a few of the more than 1000 profiles on musical figures, 700 entries on famous works, and 200 important locales found in The Oxford Dictionary of Opera. Covering everything from composers, individual operas, well-known arias, and principle characters, to technical terms, librettists, and opera-houses, this is the most comprehensive one-volume reference work on all aspects of opera. Here opera buffs will have at their fingertips opera synopses and first performance details, bibliographies of works about opera, entries on singers (including their debuts and career highlights, with notes on voice type, style, and reputation), definitions and discussions of technical terms and operatic styles, and surveys of the history of opera worldwide. The editors include not only the basic information one would expect to find in an authoritative reference, but also many colorful asides that make browsing a pleasure. For example, we learn that Tristan und Isolde (Munich, 1865) was an outcome of Wagner's reading of Schopenhauer, how Verdi referred to the years between 1844 and 1859 (during which he was commissioned to write nineteen operas) as his "anni di galera" (his prison years), and how Toscanini resigned his directorship at La Scala over political tensions with the Fascists (he had previously refused to conduct the Fascist anthem at performances). In an entry on China, we learn that, unlike European opera, Chinese opera incorporates acrobatics (and often mime), and that before the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), there were over 300 regional styles of opera throughout the land. We even find an entry that lists the multitude of operas (over 300) that have been written based on Shakespeare's works. Other entries provide information on the different subdivisions of voice (from the soprano dramatique to the bariton-Martin), Russian Opera in Uzbekistan, and the definition of "Kravattentenor" (a tenor whose tone suggests he is being strangled by his neckwear). The Oxford Dictionary of Opera comes at a time when opera has reached unprecedented levels of popularity, enjoying well-filled opera houses, public television broadcasts, and huge record sales. Fully cross-referenced and packed with information, this tremendous reference is a must for all opera lovers.

Conducting Opera

Conducting Opera discusses operas in the standard repertory from the perspective of a conductor with a lifetime of experience performing them. It focuses on Joseph Rescigno's approach to preparing and performing these masterworks in order to realize what opera can uniquely achieve: a fusion of music and drama resulting in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Opening with a chapter discussing his performance philosophy, Rescigno then covers Mozart's most-performed operas, standards of the bel canto school including Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, five of Verdi's works including La traviata, a selection of Wagner's compositions followed by French Romantic operas such as Bizet's Carmen, Puccini's major works, and finally four operas by Richard Strauss. A useful appendix contains a convenient guide to the scores available online. Conducting Opera includes practical advice about propelling a story forward and bringing out the drama that the music is meant to supply, as well as how to support singers in their most difficult moments. Rescigno identifies particularly problematic passages and supplies suggestions about how to navigate them. In addition, he provides advice on staying true to the several styles under discussion.

Opera: The Great Composers and their Masterworks

An introduction to four hundred years of opera and its composers with recommended key recordings for the key opera singers.

The New Grove Book of Operas

Available now, for the first time, is this single volume of opera reference with selections carefully extracted from the classic four-volume set of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera--the most comprehensive dictionary of opera in the world. The New Grove Book of Operas presents the most popularentries from the four-volume encyclopedia and combines the meticulous Grove scholarship with a lightness of touch and readability that will delight any opera-goer. The selections have been made by editor and world-renowned musicologist Stanley Sadie.The New Grove Book of Operas includes over 250 operas performed around the world, in major opera houses, for the past quarter of a century, from the very earliest operas still in production to the most recent works of the twentieth century. A handful of additional works has also been chosen ashaving particular interest, merit, or historical significance.Listed alphabetically by opera, the entries range from Handel's Acis and Galatea, to Verdi's Macbeth, to Britten's Peter Grimes, to Mozart's Die Zauberflote. Each includes a full synopsis of the plot described by the leading authority on either the opera itself or the composer, a cast list, a noteon the singers in the original production, and information on the origins of the work and its literary and social background. Contributions conclude with a brief comment on the particular opera's place in operatic history. The stunning color and black-and-white illustrations throughout bring afascinating and often amusing dimension to the text and show how the staging of opera has changed from its original to its most modern "deconstructed" productions.Fully cross-referenced with a listing of operas by composer, an index of characters, an index of first lines of arias, and a complete glossary, The New Grove Book of Operas is both remarkably easy to use for the novice and comprehensive enough in its scholarship to satisfy even the mostsophisticated opera buff. It is the essential, must-have guide for a season at the opera.

Operatic Geographies

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house's physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house's spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house's landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts--from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the "Old" world to the "New." One of the book's most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments--that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls' schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera's spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.   

Siren Songs

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture of fin-de-siècle Paris, the phenomenon of opera seria's "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in Verdi's Don Carlos, and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

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