Download or read book Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien R gime 1647 1785 written by Downing A. Thomas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recognizes the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture.
Download or read book Gr try s Operas and the French Public written by R.J. Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Download or read book Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France written by Olivia Bloechl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
Download or read book Operatic Migrations written by DowningA. Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them. Topics covered include transformations of literary sources and their migration into the operatic genre; works that move across geographical and social boundaries into different cultural contexts; movements between media and/or genre as well as alterations through interpretation and performance of the composer's creation; the translation of spoken theatre to lyric theatre; the theoretical issues contingent on the rendering of 'speech' into 'song'; and the transforming effects of aesthetic considerations as they bear on opera. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries between music, literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history, the volume enriches our knowledge and understanding of the operatic experience and the works. The book will therefore appeal to those working in the field of music, literary and cultural studies, and to those with a particular interest in opera and musical theatre.
Download or read book Opera s Orbit written by Stefanie Tcharos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tcharos illustrates opera's engagement in a larger musical sphere of Arcadian Rome, where opera inspired debate and fuelled ideological reform.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Opera written by Helen M. Greenwald and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2014 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.
Download or read book The Rival Sirens written by Suzanne Aspden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women, Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers, as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture 1680 1880 written by Sarah Hibberd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has been associated with music from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. This volume offers a historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime. Together, the authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. They demonstrate music's strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power, allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The volume opens up two avenues for further research suggested by the adjective 'sonorous': a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that shares boundaries with other sounding phenomena.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera written by Jacqueline Waeber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.
Download or read book The Politics of Opera in Handel s Britain written by Thomas McGeary and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas McGeary's book explores the relationship between Italian opera and British partisan politics in the era of George Frideric Handel.
Download or read book Film Music A History written by James Wierzbicki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film Music: A History explains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and philosophical circumstances. The book’s four large parts are given over to Music and the "Silent" Film (1894--1927), Music and the Early Sound Film (1895--1933), Music in the "Classical-Style" Hollywood Film (1933--1960), and Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958--2008). Whereas most treatments of the subject are simply chronicles of "great film scores" and their composers, this book offers a genuine history of film music in terms of societal changes and technological and economic developments within the film industry. Instead of celebrating film-music masterpieces, it deals—logically and thoroughly—with the complex ‘machine’ whose smooth running allowed those occasional masterpieces to happen and whose periodic adjustments prompted the large-scale twists and turns in film music’s path.
Download or read book Technology and the Diva written by Karen Henson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.
Download or read book Rounding Wagner s Mountain written by Bryan Gilliam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Strauss' fifteen operas make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. In the first book to discuss all of Strauss' operas, Bryan Gilliam explores the composer's response to Wagner in his discussion of Strauss's stage works and their historical contexts.
Download or read book Saint Sa ns and the Stage written by Hugh Macdonald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study of Saint-Saëns's stage music, timed to coincide with revivals of his operas on stage.
Download or read book Organic Supplements written by Miriam Jacobson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.
Download or read book Female Singers on the French Stage 1830 1848 written by Kimberly White and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the profession of singing, operatic culture, and the representation of female performers on the nineteenth century French stage.
