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Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age ofGiselleat the Paris Opéra (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opéra during a period long celebrated for its box-office successes in both genres. Smith begins by showing how gestures were encoded in the musical language that composers used in ballet and in opera. She moves on to a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the gestures of the singers and the movements of the dancers, and the distinction between dance that represents dancing (entertainment staged within the story of the opera) and dance that represents action. Smith maintains that ballet-pantomime and opera continued to rely on each other well into the nineteenth century, even as they thrived independently. The \"divorce\" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score forGiselle.

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide \"sheer\" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the \"merely entertaining\" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discussesCos\" fan tutteas a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

Mozart's \"Le Nozze di Figaro\" (\"The Marriage of Figaro\") is an opera of such elegant genius and humane wit, just the act of playing through the score can generate a glow. But when \"Figaro\" is produced with a cast of fine young singing actors, and a director willing to look below all the breezy comedy to the deeper emotional life that the composer and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte chronicle, the opera takes on an incandescence that remains long after the fourth-act curtain. Mozart based his opera on an incendiary French play by Beaumarchais, itself a sequel to an earlier play, \"The Barber of Seville.\" Giovanni Paisiello composed an opera based on \"The Barber of Seville\" around the time Mozart was writing \"Figaro,\" but of course it is Rossini's later version of \"Barber\" that has remained in the repertoire. Those who caught Washington Opera's recent production of Rossini's \"Barber\" have a rare opportunity to follow the lives of Rossini's characters as Mozart and Da Ponte thicken the plot. Simone Alberghini steers clear of making Figaro either an affable trickster who bumbles into good luck, or the face of underclass revolt. His Figaro is an overworked guy who's plain tired of Almaviva's meddlings in his life and goes about fixing things quietly and methodically. If this makes for a more unsmiling performance of the role than is sometimes the case, so be it: This is a recognizably human Figaro.

Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers’ revisions, singers’ improvisations, and stage directors’ re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some of our best-loved musical works. It looks at opera's history of multiple visions and revisions and asks a simple question: what exactly is opera? Remaking the Song, rich in imaginative answers, considers works by Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Berio in order to challenge what many regard as sacroscant: the opera’s musical text. Scholarly tradition favors the idea of great operatic texts permanently inscribed in the canon. Roger Parker, considering examples ranging from Cecilia Bartoli's much-criticized insistence on using Mozart's alternative arias in the Marriage of Figaro to Luciano Berio's new ending to Puccini's unfinished Turandot, argues that opera is an inherently mutable form, and that all of us—performers, listeners, scholars—should celebrate operatic revisions as a way of opening works to contemporary needs and new pleasures.

None of the characters in Mozart's most popular opera, The Marriage of Figaro , can afford to stand still for long - even when hiding in a closet or under a bed. There are so many subplots and shenanigans in the opera buffa based on part two of 18th-century French dramatist Pierre Beaumarchais's Figaro trilogy, that anyone who stops to do anything but sing an aria risks being caught in the crossfire of mixups and romantic entanglements woven by Figaro and Susanna, Count and Countess Almaviva, Marcellina and Dr. Bartolo, Cherubino, Barbarina and others. The San Francisco Opera's Western Opera Theater doesn't stay in one place, either. The traveling company's production of Le Nozze di Figaro , the title in the original Italian, will mark the first touring presentation in the history of the Dayton Opera when it opens tonight at Memorial Hall.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

Each opera boasts sets and costumes by a famed architect and couturier from a different city, all directed by Christopher Alden. Mezzo-soprano Rachel Frenkel's freshly fervent Cherubino, the hormone-addled boy sung by a girl, presented enough context for a semester of cross-gender studies.

Some attitudes struck were overly contemporary; while there was a fair amount of sexual innuendo, there was a surprising lack of sexual tension - and this opera demands that, as much as it does its hints of revolution in the air.

The name is a fitting tribute: what Mr. Amato created and nurtured for six decades was, above all, an act of love.

James Hampton was just a humble janitor, but unknown to even his family, he was a modern visionary who spent 14 years constructing a strange and beautiful masterpiece in an old garage he rented titled, \"The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.\" It is one of the most eccentric works in American art and he filled several notebooks with writings he kept in conjunction with his work on \"The Throne.\" Hampton wrote in a secret script of his own devising which, despite the efforts of cryptographers, has yet to be deciphered. \"Possessed with a voice that is probably one of the best natural instruments ever heard, [Beverly Cosham] is thrilling,\" said Leigh Spear of Talk of L.A. \"She brings so much meaning to lyrics.\"