EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book North German Opera in the Age of Goethe

Download or read book North German Opera in the Age of Goethe written by Thomas Bauman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first study of the development of German opera in northern Germany from the first comic operas of Johann Adam Hiller at Leipzig in 1766 to the end of the century. Intellectually and historically, the period witnessed the flowering of the German stage and German letters. German opera was an inseparable part of the new aspirations of the German stage during the Enlightenment. Thomas Bauman stresses the vital role of the mixed repertories of German companies in effecting changes in the genre. North German opera began as a basically literary genre. It then changed dramatically in response to two major trends: first, the contact with the serious elements and styles of tragedy and secondly, the triumph on German stages of Italian, French, and Viennese comic operas. The book is generously illustrated with music examples. There is also a complete catalogue of texts of North German opera: those composed for performance and unset published librettos both cross-indexed under the librettists' names.

Book Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven

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.

Book The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera

Download or read book The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera written by Roger Parker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.

Book Operas in German

    Book Details:
  • Author : Margaret Ross Griffel
  • Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
  • Release : 2018-01-23
  • ISBN : 1442247975
  • Pages : 1046 pages

Download or read book Operas in German written by Margaret Ross Griffel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 1046 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With nearly three thousand new entries, the revised edition of Operas in German: A Dictionary is the most current encyclopedic treatment of operas written specifically to a German text from the seventeenth century through 2016. Musicologist Margaret Ross Griffel details the operas’ composers, scores, librettos, first performances, and bibliographic sources. Four appendixes then list composers, librettists, authors whose works inspired or were adapted for the opera librettos, and a chronological listing of the entries in the A–Z section. The bibliography details other dictionaries and encyclopedias, performance studies, collections of plot summaries, general studies on operas, sources on locales where opera premieres took place, works on the history of operas in German, and selective volumes on individual opera composers, librettists, producers, directors, and designers. Finally, two indexes list the main characters in each opera and the names of singers, conductors, producers, composers, directors, choreographers, and arrangers. The revised edition of Operas in German provides opera historians, musicologists, performers, and opera lovers with an invaluable resource for continued study and enjoyment. As the most current encyclopedic collection of German opera from the seventeenth century through the twenty-first, Operas in German is an invaluable resource for opera historians, musicologists, performers, and opera lovers.

Book Reader s Guide to Music

    Book Details:
  • Author : Murray Steib
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2013-12-02
  • ISBN : 1135942625
  • Pages : 928 pages

Download or read book Reader s Guide to Music written by Murray Steib and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Book The Classical Era

    Book Details:
  • Author : Professor Neal Zaslaw
  • Publisher : Springer
  • Release : 2016-07-14
  • ISBN : 1349206288
  • Pages : 426 pages

Download or read book The Classical Era written by Professor Neal Zaslaw and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the series examining the development of music in specific places during particular times, this book looks at the classical period, in Europe and America, from Vienna and Salzburg to the Iberian courts and Philadelphia.

Book Music in Goethe s Faust

Download or read book Music in Goethe s Faust written by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goethe's Faust, a work which has attracted the attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century, hashad a seminal impact in musical realms.

Book Goethe  Revolution and renunciation  1790 1803

Download or read book Goethe Revolution and renunciation 1790 1803 written by Nicholas Boyle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 998 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the second volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution, which turned his life upside down, and of the German philosophical revolution which ushered in the periods of Idealismand Romanticism. It was also a period dominated by two intense personal relationships: with Schiller, Weimar's other great poet, philosopher, and dramatist, and with Christiana Vulpius, the mother of his son. Goethe was a poet of supreme intelligence and sensitivity living through political andintellectual changes which have shaped the modern world. The transition into modernity is the theme of this volume: Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars; the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which he absorbed and adapted and which for ten years made Jena theintellectual capital of Europe; the political upheaval initiated by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in which Goethe had grown up, and with it the cultural role he had envisaged for Jena and Weimar. Boyle vividly narrates both the large-scale events and the personal dramas of thisexciting time, to give lucid accounts of important thinkers whom English readers have hitherto found inaccessible, and to analyse in new ways Goethe's works of the period, notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust.

Book The Unknown Schubert

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lorraine Byrne Bodley
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2017-07-05
  • ISBN : 1351539833
  • Pages : 294 pages

Download or read book The Unknown Schubert written by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect i

Book E  T  A  Hoffmann  Cosmopolitanism  and the Struggle for German Opera

Download or read book E T A Hoffmann Cosmopolitanism and the Struggle for German Opera written by Francien Markx and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann and opera, Francien Markx examines Hoffmann’s writings on opera and the challenges they pose to established narratives of aesthetic autonomy, the search for a national opera, and Hoffmann’s biography. Markx discusses Hoffmann’s lifelong fascination with opera against the backdrop of eighteenth-century theater reform, the creation of national identity, contemporary performance practices and musical and aesthetic discourses as voiced by C. M. von Weber, A. W. Schlegel, Heine, and Wagner, among others. The book reconsiders the traditional view that German opera followed a deterministic trajectory toward Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and reveals a cosmopolitan spirit in Hoffmann’s operatic vision, most notably exemplified by his controversial advocacy for Spontini in Berlin.

Book A Short History of Opera

    Book Details:
  • Author : Donald J. Grout
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2003-07-18
  • ISBN : 0231507720
  • Pages : 1047 pages

Download or read book A Short History of Opera written by Donald J. Grout and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-18 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have. The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day. A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included. With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.

Book Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire

Download or read book Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire written by Austin Glatthorn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Packed full of new archival evidence that reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the 'Classical era', this interdisciplinary study investigates key locations, genres, music, and musicians. Austin Glatthorn explores the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. He maps an extensive network of Central European theatres; reconstructs the repertoire they shared; and explores how print media, personal correspondence, and their dissemination shaped and regulated this music. He then investigates the development of German melodrama and examines how articulations of the Holy Roman Empire on the musical stage expressed imperial belonging. Glatthorn engages with the most recent historical interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire and offers quantitative, empirical analysis of repertoire supported by conventional close readings to illustrate a shared culture of music theatre that transcended traditional boundaries in music scholarship.

Book Frederick the Great

Download or read book Frederick the Great written by Tim Blanning and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of the legendary autocrat whose enlightened rule transformed the map of Europe and changed the course of history Few figures loom as large in European history as Frederick the Great. When he inherited the Prussian crown in 1740, he ruled over a kingdom of scattered territories, a minor Germanic backwater. By the end of his reign, the much larger and consolidated Prussia ranked among the continent’s great powers. In this magisterial biography, award-winning historian Tim Blanning gives us an intimate, in-depth portrait of a king who dominated the political, military, and cultural life of Europe half a century before Napoleon. A brilliant, ambitious, sometimes ruthless monarch, Frederick was a man of immense contradictions. This consummate conqueror was also an ardent patron of the arts who attracted painters, architects, musicians, playwrights, and intellectuals to his court. Like his fellow autocrat Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick was captivated by the ideals of the Enlightenment—for many years he kept up lively correspondence with Voltaire and other leading thinkers of the age. Yet, like Catherine, Frederick drew the line when it came to implementing Enlightenment principles that might curtail his royal authority. Frederick’s terrifying father instilled in him a stern military discipline that would make the future king one of the most fearsome battlefield commanders of his day, while deriding as effeminate his son’s passion for modern ideas and fine art. Frederick, driven to surpass his father’s legacy, challenged the dominant German-speaking powers, including Saxony, Bavaria, and the Habsburg Monarchy. It was an audacious foreign policy gambit, one at which Frederick, against the expectations of his rivals, succeeded. In examining Frederick’s private life, Blanning also carefully considers the long-debated question of Frederick’s sexuality, finding evidence that Frederick lavished gifts on his male friends and maintained homosexual relationships throughout his life, while limiting contact with his estranged, unloved queen to visits that were few and far between. The story of one man’s life and the complete political and cultural transformation of a nation, Tim Blanning’s sweeping biography takes readers inside the mind of the monarch, giving us a fresh understanding of Frederick the Great’s remarkable reign. Praise for Frederick the Great “Writing Frederick’s biography . . . requires a diverse set of skills: expertise in eighteenth-century diplomatic and military history, including the intricacies of the Holy Roman Empire; a familiarity with the music, architecture and intellectual traditions of Northern Europe; and, not least, a profound sense of human psychology, the better to grasp the makeup of this complex and tormented man. Fortunately, Tim Blanning . . . has all of these skills in abundance.”—The Wall Street Journal “At once scholarly and highly readable . . . [Blanning] has given us a superb portrait of an enlightened despot, equally at home on the battlefield and in the opera house, both utterly ruthless and culturally refined.”—Commentary “Blanning, in clear thinking and prose, investigates all aspects of Frederick’s personality and reign. . . . The last word on this significant king, for years to come.”—Booklist (starred review) “Masterly . . . Blanning brilliantly brings to life one of the most complex characters of modern European history.”—The Telegraph (five stars) “A supremely nuanced account . . . This biography finds [Blanning] at the height of his powers.”—Literary Review

Book Sovereign Feminine

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthew Head
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2013-05-09
  • ISBN : 0520273842
  • Pages : 350 pages

Download or read book Sovereign Feminine written by Matthew Head and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal—linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.

Book Essays on Opera  1750 1800

Download or read book Essays on Opera 1750 1800 written by JohnA. Rice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has flourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social, and political context has vastly increased. This volume explores opera and operatic life of the years 1750-1800 through a selection of articles intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.

Book Goethe Yearbook 25

    Book Details:
  • Author : Adrian Daub
  • Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
  • Release : 2018-06-15
  • ISBN : 1640140034
  • Pages : 340 pages

Download or read book Goethe Yearbook 25 written by Adrian Daub and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on acoustics around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 25 features a special section on acoustics around 1800, edited by Mary Helen Dupree, which includes, among others, contributionson sound and listening in Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (Robert Ryder) and on the role of the tympanum in Herder's aesthetic theory (Tyler Whitney). The volume also contains essays on Goethe and stage sequels(Matthew Birkhold), on figures of armament in eighteenth-century German drama (Susanne Fuchs), on the dialectics of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister (Galia Benziman), on the Gothic motif in Goethe's Faust and "Von deutscher Baukunst" (Jessica Resvick), on Goethe and Salomon Maimon (Jason Yonover), on Goethe's "Novelle" (Ehrhard Bahr), and on Schiller's Bürger critique (Hans Richard Brittnacher). Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Galia Benziman, Matthew H. Birkhold, Hans Richard Brittnacher, Linda Dietrick, Mary Helen Dupree, Susanne Fuchs, Deva Kemmis, Jessica C. Resvick, Robert Ryder, Patricia Anne Simpson, Chenxi Tang, Tyler Whitney, Jason Yonover, Chunjie Zhang. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford University. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis.

Book Operatic Migrations

    Book Details:
  • Author : DowningA. Thomas
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2017-07-05
  • ISBN : 1351555707
  • Pages : 291 pages

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 291 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.