Download or read book Mozart and His Operas written by David Cairns and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted music critic weaves a brilliantly engaging narrative which puts Mozart's operas in the context of his life, showing how they illuminate his creativity as a whole.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Mozart written by Simon P. Keefe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Understanding the Women of Mozart s Operas written by Kristi Brown-Montesano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Download or read book Mozart s Operas written by Mozart and published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classics.
Download or read book Le nozze di Figaro written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Wells introduces the opera with a high-spirited account of the action-packed career of the author, in many respects the prototype of Figaro himself. Basil Deane explores the score: he shows that Mozart's characters are illuminated here not so much in soliloquies but in their reactions to each other. Composer Stephen Oliver discusses how the comedy exists not just in the words but, essentially, in the music. The full Italian text is given, with a note on the order of scenes in Act Three and the alternative passages Mozart wrote for the 1789 revival. The classic translation of E.J. Dent is an excellent way to get to know the twists and turns of the plot and the stylish wit of da Ponte's innuendos.Contents: A Society Marriage, John Wells; A Musical Commentary, Basil Deane; Music and Comedy in 'The Marriage of Figaro, Stephen Oliver; Beaumarchais's Characters; Le nozze di Figaro: Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte; The Marriage of Figaro: English version by Edward J. Dent
Download or read book Understanding Music written by N. Alan Clark and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!
Download or read book Mozart written by Roye E. Wates and published by Amadeus Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Amadeus). Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths explores in detail 20 of the composer's major works in the context of his tragically brief life and the turbulent times in which he lived. Addressed to non-musicians seeking to deepen their technical appreciation for his music while learning more about Mozart the man than the caricature portrayed in the 1986 movie Amadeus , this book offers extensive biographical and historical background debunking many well-established Mozart myths along with guided study of compositions representing every genre of 18th-century music: opera, concerto, symphony, church music, divertimento and serenade, sonata, and string quartet. Author Roye E. Wates, a Mozart specialist, has taught music history to thousands of non-musicians, both undergraduates and adults, as a Professor of Music at Boston University and from 2002-2004 as director of Boston University's Adult Music Seminar at Tanglewood, summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths provides a unique combination of biographical detail, up-to-date research, detailed musical analyses, and clear definitions of terms. Amateurs as well as more advanced musicians will gain a greater understanding of Mozart's encyclopedic mastery.
Download or read book Performing Operas for Mozart written by Ian Woodfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Prague Italian opera company and its role in performing Mozart's works in the late eighteenth-century.
Download or read book Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven written by Martin Nedbal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about German national theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics, state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and national identity in theater further transformed in response to the crisis of Emperor Joseph II’s reform movement, the revolutionary ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals in theatrical performances through the institution of theater censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic works (such as Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio) that eventually became the cornerstones for later developments of German culture.
Download or read book Mozart s Operas written by Daniel Heartz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned Mozart scholar Daniel Heartz brings his deep knowledge of social history, theater, and art to a study of the last and great decade of Mozart's operas. Mozart specialists will recognize some of Heartz's best-known essays here; but six pieces are new for the collection, and others have been revised and updated with little-known documents on the librettist's, composer's, and stage director's craft. All lovers of opera will value the elegance and wit of Professor Heartz's writing, enhanced by thirty-seven illustrations, many from his private collection. The volume includes Heartz's classic essay on Idomeneo (1781), the work that continued to inspire and sustain Mozart through his next, and final, six operas. Thomas Bauman brings his special expertise to a discussion of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782). The ten central chapters are devoted to the three great operas composed to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte—Le nozze di Figaro (l786), Don Giovanni (l787), and Così fan tutte (l790). The reader is treated to fresh insights on da Ponte's role as Mozart's astute and stage-wise collaborator, on the singers whose gifts helped shape each opera, and on the musical connections among the three works. Parallels are drawn with some of the greatest creative artists in other fields, such as Molière, Watteau, and Fragonard. The world of the dance, one of Heartz's specialties, lends an illuminating perspective as well. Finally, the essays discuss the deep spirituality of Mozart's last two operas, Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito (both l79l). They also address the pertinence of opera outside Vienna at the end of the century, the fortunes and aspirations of Freemasonry in Austria, and the relation of Mozart's overtures to the dramaturgy of the operas.
Download or read book Mozart written by Jan Swafford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Download or read book The Original Portrayal of Mozart s Don Giovanni written by Magnus Tessing Schneider and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.
Download or read book Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart written by Ralph P. Locke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
Download or read book The Politics of Opera written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.
Download or read book Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera written by John A. Rice and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Mozart Haydn and Early Beethoven 1781 1802 written by Daniel Heartz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid portrait of Mozart and Haydn's greatest achievements and young Beethoven's works under their influence.
Download or read book Mozart and the Enlightenment written by Nicholas Till and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1995 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating new study of Mozart's operas, Nicholas Till shows that the composer was not a "divine idiot" but an artist whose work was informed by the ideas and discoveries of his time. Examining the dramatic emergence of a modern society in eighteenth-century Austria, Till reappraises the history and meaning of the Enlightenment and Mozart's role within it. Book jacket.
