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Opera: Italian Opera

Reference

Perspectives

Rossini

Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered thecourse of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater/I in 1832,Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece,the Petite Messe solennelle/I. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant/I who dashed off The Barber of Seville/I in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation byscholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini/I redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of hisworks is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yethad of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

Italian Opera Since 1945

First published in 1988. Italy, the birthplace of opera in the late sixteenth century, has in recent decades seen remarkable and vital musical growth, with composers as diverse as Luciano Berio and Nino Rota, Luigi Nono and Sylvano Bussotti, Giacomo Manzoni, Bruno Maderna and Salvatore Sciarrino. The musical theatre has figured prominently in the work of Italian composers during this period, ranging from operas conceived in a traditional mode to works of a Music Theatre variety, and in style from popular to avant-garde. In this book Raymond Fearn surveys this Italian musico-theatrical phenomenon in the period since the Second World War, examining a wide range of works such as Nono's Intolleranza and Al Gran Sole Carico d'Amore, Berio's Passaggio and Un re in ascolto, Manzoni's Atomtod and La Sentenza and Castiglioni's Oberon and The King's Masque, and places these developments within a cultural and theatrical context

Puccini

In this comprehensive exploration of Puccini's most beloved operas, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, John Bell Young celebrates some of the most moving music ever composed. In clear-cut, concise, but also entertaining prose, the author conveys the poignant stories that inspired these great works, elaborating their musical as well as dramatic content. An ideal companion for experienced opera devotees as well as those who are discovering opera for the first time.

Verdi

Verdi's Messa da Requiem is one of the most frequently performed works of the choral repertoire, and one of Verdi's most important non-operatic works. This new handbook offers an up-to-date account of the work's genesis, its performance history, and issues regarding performing practice. The central chapters provide a descriptive analysis of the work, while exploring some of the critical issues raised by individual sections, such as Verdi's interpretation of the text, his reactions to previous Requiems by Mozart and Berlioz, as well as the reception of his Requiem by critics. Subsequent chapters discuss some of the most important changes and revisions Verdi made in fashioning the Requiem. The author's final discussions investigate two critical issues: the work's unità musicale, and the central issue in its reception history, its generic status and the extent to which the Requiem is operatic.

Opera's First Master

(Unlocking the Masters). Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first great opera composer and is often hailed as the creator of modern music. His genius was often likened to that of Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi, but in many of the world's opera houses his operas often receive an almost chilly respect, far removed from the nearly universal love aroused by those later masters. This book, the first layperson's guide to Monteverdi, seeks to stimulate appreciation for his operas by examining them not as musicological relics but as the vital theatrical experiences they are. Ringer places Monteverdi's operatic works within the musical and theatrical framework of his era, offering a brief sketch of the composer's early years and detailing the complex forces that led to the emergence of opera in late sixteenth-century Florence. Opera's First Master enables opera lovers to see and hear Monteverdi's masterpieces anew, while opening new channels of inquiry into how Monteverdean opera "works" in the theater.

Domenico Scarlatti

Again available in paperback, this definitive work on the genius of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) is the result of twelve years of devoted effort by America's foremost harpsichordist and one of the principal authorities on eighteenth-century harpsichord music. Mr. Kirkpatrick traveled extensively to collect material that has tripled the known facts about Scarlatti's life, providing the first adequate biography of one of the greatest harpsichord composers of the eighteenth century and one of the most original composers of all time. The second half of his book is an illuminating study of Scarlatti's 555 sonatas, concluding with a chapter on their performance. The book contains extensive appendixes, including discussions of ornamentation and Scarlatti's vocal music, and an updated section of addenda and corrigenda.

Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance

This is a study of the secular music of Claudio Monteverdi, the foremost Italian composer of the late Renaissance. Gary Tomlinson bases his narrative on the works themselves - nine books of madrigals; three complete operas and a fragment of a fourth; and numerous canzonette, scherzi, and arie, all written between 1584 and 1642 - but his approach is as much literary and cultural as purely musical. The relationship between music, poetry, and cultural ideology is at the core of the discussion, and Tomlinson pays particular attention to Monteverdi's position within the context of late-Renaissance humanist and scholastic values. He also shows that the extraordinary variety of responses to poetry in Monteverdi's music was induced by the wide stylistic diversity of the poems themselves. For Monteverdi, the expressive power of music was a function of its relation to its text, and it is the unceasing imagination he brought to musical transfiguration of poetry which Tomlinson continually stresses in this book.

La Bohème

Websites

Tosca - A Tale of Love and Torture (Feature Version)

Aida

Famous Figures

"The Barber Of Seville"