Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

In this article the most significant trends in the development of 18th century Russian Court music are discussed. The era of reforms initiated by Tsar Peter I created the most favourable conditions to allow European music to enter the culture of the Russian Court and wider urban society. Absorption of the genres and forms of European music, specifically Italian, French and German music, blending them with Russian musical traditions, was the principal vector influencing development of national culture during the 18th century. In the reign of Empress Catherine, the Great, these tendencies were exhibited in the works of the Spanish composer, Vicente Martín y Soler. A detailed analysis is made of the genre and stylistic features of the so-called «Russian» operas of this composer associated with the travesty of motives and plots of epic genres; the musical and stylistic features of serious opera are also subjected to comic reinterpretation. El artículo analiza las tendencias más importantes en el desarrollo de la música de la corte rusa del siglo XVIII. La época de las reformas de Pedro I creó las condiciones más favorables para que la música europea hiciera su entrada en la corte rusa y en la cultura urbana. Dominar los géneros y las formas de la música europea (italiana, francesa, alemana) y combinarlos con las tradiciones musicales nacionales es el principal vector de desarrollo de la cultura rusa del Setecientos. Durante el reinado de Catalina la Grande, estas tendencias se manifiestan en las obras del español Vicente Martín y Soler. Las características estilísticas de género de las llamadas «óperas rusas» del compositor, asociadas con la parodia de motivos y tramas de géneros épicos, se someten a un análisis más detallado, pues los rasgos estilísticos de la ópera seria también están sujetos a una reinterpretación cómica.

Defined by a civil war and political tumult, the year 1863 is well known in the history of Mexico as one of singular import, but less so as a milestone of national musical and cultural achievement. Nevertheless, from January through the departure of Benito Juárez and his cabinet from the capital in May, to the installation of Archduke Maximilian as Emperor in November, an unprecedented number of newly composed operas by Mexican composers were staged. All set to preexisting Italian libretti (including titles by Felice Romani and Gaetano Rossi for Carlo Coccia and Vincenzo Bellini, respectively), these works were nevertheless the unique manifestation of a school of Mexican composers expressing themselves en masse for the first time. With the impending conflict, an exodus of resident Italian opera companies by 1861 left the field wide-open to enterprising Mexicans, with Cenobio Paniagua (1821-1882) and Octaviano Valle (1826-1869) in the forefront. A fleeting moment in operatic history, this fascinating year now lends itself to deeper scrutiny, thanks to the resurfacing of long-unavailable musical and archival sources. While these works had remained lost until only recently, several scores have begun reemerging. Of these, limited availability of fragments from Romeo e Giulietta by Melesio Morales (his first effort) and Valle’s ill-fated Clotilde di Cosenza provide crucial insight, while permitting these rarities to be sampled for the first time. Paniagua’s autographs—though recently rediscovered—proved far less available, while materials for I due Foscari by Mateo Torres Serrato remain lost. Limited documentation has long presented further challenges to demystifying what might be considered a legendary period. However, reviewing the underlying politico-historic, artistic, and economic reasons for its impetus, this article will explore and contextualize the circumstances leading to this unprecedented explosion of operatic expression, making a sort of anno mirabilis of one of the hardest years in Mexico’s history.

The two main narratives that coexist in Russian musicological literature – notably in the field of opera – fall within the branches of russkaja and zarubežnaja muzyka. The first is inward-looking, self-referential, aiming at enhancing the peculiarities of the original, peculiar, and autochthonous contribution to Russian musical culture; the other studies Western music and its evolution separately from the previous one. This approach differs from Western scholarship, which today tries to integrate the Russian musical phenomenon into the global horizon. While this difference can be explained through historical reasons, much remains to be done regarding communication between scientific communities and the coordination of efforts made to study sources that are still too dispersed and difficult to submit to an overall view. Observing the current state of research, my contribution highlights potential directions in the frame of Slavic studies, such as the reception of Western opera in Russia, the mobility of musicians and musical assets, the reception and evolution of aesthetic thinking, and the vocabulary with which this was expressed, particularly in the imperial era.

This article reconsiders two of Rossini's exoticist farces, L'italiana in Algeri (1813) and Il turco in Italia (1814), in the light of recent theoretical studies in tourism. These operas appeared at the juncture between the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and nineteenth-century mass tourism, and they became implicated in multiple layers of tourist experience. Travellers from faraway countries went to see productions in Italy, yet the operas tell stories of journeys between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. These operas were an object of the tourist gaze even as they perpetuated that gaze through imaginary encounters with exotic others. In the article, I explain the role of Italian opera in tourism at the turn of the eighteenth century and suggest ways in which tourist theory might help us understand Stendhal's operatic encounters, which in turn form part of the documentary basis of my study. I conclude that Rossini and his librettists upended many of the established hierarchies of tourism in these works, offering a fascinating critique of the tourist gaze in the process.

In 1828, five years after the premiere in Venice of Rossini's final Italian opera, Semiramide, Gaetano Rossi's libretto was again set to music, this time by the famed bel canto tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City. The opera, one of the first to be composed in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish empire, was intended to demonstrate independent Mexico's ability not just to import Italian opera from Europe but also to produce new works. Instead of proving Mexico's credentials as a successful operatic nation, however, García's Semiramide became a problematic space for bringing to light tensions between underlying colonial resistance and the new liberal influence of France, England and Italy. This article contextualises this momentous operatic event within the wider frame of Mexico's nation building and investigates how the manifold political tensions and cultural contradictions of Mexico's postcolonial transition were absorbed and amplified by both García's composition and its staging.

Giacomo Puccini’s artistic creation spans a period of 40 years, from 1884 to 1924, during which time he composed 12 works. This small number proves once again the great artistic exigency of the composer. The enormous success that Giacomo Puccini’s works have enjoyed since his life, continues to this day and is constantly growing. We aim to analyze the area SI, MI CHIAMANO MIMÌ from LA BOHÉMA’s work with personal interpretative aspects.

In Naples, Gioachino Rossini creates some of his works for representations in other cities. The best known, the Barber of Seville or Useless Precaution, opened on February 20, 1816, atTeatro Argentina in Rome. The booklet, a version of Pierre de Beaumarchais’s eponymous novel, was rewritten by Cesare Sterbini, being a variant other than that already used by Giovanni Paisiello. Moreover, since then the work has enjoyed a great popularity, contributing to this triumph and the extremely short period in which it was conceived: two or three weeks. Later, Rossini claimed that he had created the work in just twelve days. The opening, initially bearing the title of Almaviva, was not successful, as the admirers of Paisiello, extremely indignant, sabotaged the show by whistling and shouting throughout the first act. However, shortly after the second performance, the work became so appreciated that the fame of Paisiello’s work was transferred to Rossini, the title The Barber of Seville becoming an inalienable Rossinian heritage. Il Barbiere was not Rossini’s favourite work. Ironically, it won the status of classical opera much later, at the end of the Rossini’s career. Today we clearly consider its status as the first in the history of the work, often overlooking the radical impact it had at the time of the opening, when it shocked and provoked a large audience of unknowing persons. The speed of his writing could explain the dramatic drop in intensity felt in the second half of the second act.

The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad. While many of the accompanying stories were exaggerated, or even invented, by later generations, Verdi's operas-along with those by Rossini, Donizetti, and Mercadante-did inspire Italians to imagine Italy as an independent and unified nation. Capturing what it was like to attend the opera or to join in the music at an aristocratic salon,Waiting for Verdishows that the moral dilemmas, emotional reactions, and journalistic polemics sparked by these performances set new horizons for what Italians could think, feel, say, and write. Among the lessons taught by this music were that rules enforced by artistic tradition could be broken, that opera could jolt spectators into intense feeling even as it educated them, and that Italy could be in the vanguard of stylistic and technical innovation rather than clinging to the glories of centuries past. More practically, theatrical performances showed audiences that political change really was possible, making the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.

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.