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Animation, plasticity, and music in Italy, 1770-1830
\"This pathbreaking study of Italian stage works reconsiders a crucial period of music history: the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. In her interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how Enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music and vice versa. As Lockhart concludes, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years spanning 1770-1830. Animation, plasticity, and music in Italy, 1770-1830 begins with an exploration of a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from around 1800, then traces and connects a set of core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Animation, plasticity, and music in Italy, 1770-1830
This path-breaking study of stage works in Italian musical performances reconsiders a crucial period of music history. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how Enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music, and vice versa. As Lockhart reveals, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years spanning 1770-1830. Taking as its point of departure a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from this period, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy traces its core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.
eBook
Drama in the music of Franz Schubert
It is commonly assumed that Franz Schubert (1797-1828), best known for the lyricism of his songs, symphonies, and chamber music, lacked comparable talent for drama. Challenging this view, Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert provides a timely re-evaluation of Schubert's operatic works, while demonstrating previously unsuspected locations of dramatic innovation in his vocal and instrumental music. The volume draws on a range of critical approaches and techniques, including semiotics, topic theory, literary criticism, narratology, and Schenkerian analysis, to situate Schubertian drama within its musical and cultural-historical context. In so doing, the study broadens the boundaries of what might be considered 'dramatic' within the composer's music and offers new perspectives for its analysis and interpretation. Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert will be of interest to musicologists, music theorists, composers, and performers, as well as scholars working in cultural studies, theatre, and aesthetics.
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Staging Harmony
InStaging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people's reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for.
The theater represented the music of the church's present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus, Shakespeare'sThe TempestandThe Winter's Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
eBook
The opera manual
You are getting ready for a performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and you have a few questions. How many clarinets are in the orchestra? How many orchestra members appear onstage? How many different sets are there? How long does the opera typically run? What are the key arias? Are any special effects or ballet choreography required? Who owns the rights? Where was it premiered? What are the leading and supporting roles? The Opera Manual is the only single source for the answers to these and other important questions. It is the ultimate companion for opera lovers, professionals, scholars, and teachers, featuring comprehensive information about, and plot summaries for, more than 550 operas—including every opera that is likely to be performed today, from standard to rediscovered contemporary works. The book is invaluable, especially for opera professionals, who will find everything they need for choosing and staging operas. But it is also a treasure for listeners. Similar reference books commonly skip over scenes and supporting characters in their plot summaries, lacking even the most basic facts about staging, orchestral, and vocal requirements. The Opera Manual, based on the actual scores of the works discussed, is the only exhaustive, up-to-date opera companion—a “recipe book” that will enable its readers to explore those operas they know and discover new ones to sample and enjoy.
eBook
Fruits of the cross : Passiontide music theater in Habsburg Vienna
\"In this first detailed study of seventeenth-century sepolcri, semi-staged sacred operas performed on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, Robert L. Kendrick delves into the political and artistic world of Habsburg Vienna, where music and ritual combined on the stage to produce a thoroughly original art form that would impact music and performance across early modern Europe. Through the use of allegorical characters, the messages in the plays ranged from the devotionally intense to the theologically complex to the ugly anti-Jewish and played a unique role in making Passion piety both articulate and relevant to wider cultural concerns. Beyond the slightly worn historiographic generalizations on Habsburg religiosity (pietas Austriaca), Fruits of the Cross suggests that understanding the sepolcri has implications for ritual theater in early modern Europe, the theatricalization of devotion, the power of allegory, the role of queenship in court ideology, the interplay between visuality and music, and not least the intellectual centrality of music theater to court self-understanding\"--Provided by publisher.
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Meyerbeer's Singspiele and Opéras-Comiques
This book considers Meyerbeer's operas, written in the venerable tradition of song interspersed with spoken dialogue, deriving from the French opéra-comique and continued in the German Singspiel. His early operas Jephtas Gelübde (1812), Wirt und Gast (1813) and Das Brandenburger Tor (1814) reveal the composer's dramatic and vocal skills, and gift for large-scale construction. The high drama of the tragédie lyrique and the homespun charms of the Spieloper are essayed with imagination, thematic fluency and vivid orchestral colour. Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (1844) revealed a continuing concern with formal and stylistic elements, developed and expanded in almost ceremonial contexts. The 1850s saw the fulfilment of Meyerbeer's dream to write for the Opéra Comique in Paris. L'Etoile du Nord (1854) and Le Pardon de Ploermel (1859), using military and pastoral themes, and requiring advanced vocal and orchestral virtuosity, unfold an intricate beauty that is captivating, and shows Meyerbeer's musical and dramaturgical skills refined and carried to new extremes of technical achievement.This study examines these works in terms of origins, content and performance history.
eBook
Shakespeare, music and performance
\"Music has been an essential constituent of Shakespeare's plays from the sixteenth century to the present day, yet its significance has often been overlooked or underplayed in the history of Shakespearean performance. Providing a long chronological sweep, this collection of essays traces the different uses of music in the theatre and in film from the days of the first Globe and Blackfriars to contemporary, global productions. With a unique concentration on the performance aspects of the subject, the volume offers a wide range of voices, from scholars to contemporary practitioners (including an interview with the critically-acclaimed composer Stephen Warbeck), and thus provides a rich exploration of this fascinating history from diverse perspectives\" -- Provided by publisher.
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In search of opera
In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being.
Weaving between opera's \"facts of life\" and a series of works includingThe Magic Flute, Parsifal, andPelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners.
In Search of Operamediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.
eBook