From Garrick to Gluck

From Garrick to Gluck PDF

Author: Daniel Heartz

Publisher: Pendragon Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9781576470817

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A collection of 18 essays on musical theatre in the eighteenth century, written between 1967 and 2001

Inventing the Opera House

Inventing the Opera House PDF

Author: Eugene J. Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1108421741

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This book examines the invention of the architecture of the modern opera house in Italy between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries.

Waiting for Verdi

Waiting for Verdi PDF

Author: Mary Ann Smart

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2018-06-22

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0520966570

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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 Verdi shows 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.

Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France

Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France PDF

Author: David Charlton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1316515842

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A major re-orientation in understanding opera, exploring musical comedies with spoken dialogue previously excluded from historical accounts.

Feasting and Fasting in Opera

Feasting and Fasting in Opera PDF

Author: Pierpaolo Polzonetti

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 022680495X

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Convivial beginnings. The symposium and the birth of opera ; The Renaissance banquet as multimedia art ; Orpheus at the cardinal's table ; Eating at the opera house -- "Tastes funny" : tragic and comic meals from Monteverdi to Mozart ; Comedy as embodiment in Monteverdi and Mozart ; The insatiable : tyrants and libertines ; Indulging in comic opera : gastronomy as identity -- The effects of feasting and fasting ; Coffee and chocolate from Bach to Puccini ; Verdi and the laws of gastromusicology ; The Callas diet.

Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests

Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests PDF

Author: David J. Buch

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 0226078116

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Drawing on hundreds of operas, singspiels, ballets, and plays with supernatural themes, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests argues that the tension between fantasy and Enlightenment-era rationality shaped some of the most important works of eighteenth-century musical theater and profoundly influenced how audiences and critics responded to them. David J. Buch reveals that despite—and perhaps even because of—their fundamental irrationality, fantastic and exotic themes acquired extraordinary force and popularity during the period, pervading theatrical works with music in the French, German, and Italian mainstream. Considering prominent compositions by Gluck, Rameau, and Haydn, as well as many seminal contributions by lesser-known artists, Buch locates the origins of these magical elements in such historical sources as ancient mythology, European fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and the occult. He concludes with a brilliant excavation of the supernatural roots of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, building a new foundation for our understanding of the magical themes that proliferated in Mozart’s wake.

Opera and the Politics of Tragedy

Opera and the Politics of Tragedy PDF

Author: Katharina Clausius

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1648250491

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A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

The Five Continents of Theatre

The Five Continents of Theatre PDF

Author: Eugenio Barba

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-02-11

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9004392939

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The Five Continents of Theatre undertakes the exploration of the material culture of the actor, which involves the actors’ pragmatic relations and technical functionality, their behaviour, the norms and conventions that interact with those of the audience and the society in which actors and spectators equally take part.