Download or read book Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle written by Marian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at 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 for Giselle. ?
Download or read book The Last Five Years written by and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Vocal Selections). Jason Robert Brown, the creator of Parade and Songs for a New World , has written a distinctive new Off-Broadway musical. The Last Five Years tells the story of a failed marriage of 20-somethings: he a successful novelist, she a struggling actress. Her story is told in reverse, his conventionally moving forward. They meet in the middle at the point of their wedding. Brown's strong writing has found a solid following among musical theatre fans. Our songbook features piano/vocal arrangements of 12 songs: Goodbye Until Tomorrow * I Can Do Better Than That * If I Didn't Believe in You * Moving Too Fast * The Next Ten Minutes * Nobody Needs to Know * A Part of That * The Schmuel Song * Shiksa Goddess * Still Hurting * A Summer in Ohio * When You Come Home to Me. "Short, bittersweet and nearly perfect, Brown has come up with a winning combination of music and book." Variety
Download or read book My Fair Lady written by Frederick Loewe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1956 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The text of the Broadway musical adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.
Download or read book Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater written by Nina Penner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.
Download or read book A Popular History of Music Musical Instruments Ballet and Opera from St Ambrose to Mozart written by James E. Matthew and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Opera and Drama written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. ø In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. ø This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.
Download or read book Rent written by Jonathan Larson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1997-05-21 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these pages, Rent offers what most theater books can't: a chance to step behind the curtain and feel the electricity of a stage phenomenon as it unfolds. Rent has single-handedly reinvigorated Broadway and taken America by storm. Sweeping all major theater awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as four 1996 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for a Musical, Rent captures the heart and spirit of a generation, refleting it onstage through the emotion of its stirring words and music, and the energy of its young cast. Now, for the first time, Rent comes to life on the page -- through vivid color photographs, the full libretto, and an utterly compelling behind-the-scenes oral history of the show's creation. Here is the exclusive and absolutely complete companion to Rent, told in the voices of the extraordinary talent behind its success: the actors, the director, the producers, and the librettist and composer himself, Jonathan Larson, whose sudden death, on the eve of the first performance, has made Rent's life-affirming message all the more poignant.
Download or read book Performing Arts in Changing Societies written by Randi Margrete Selvik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Arts in Changing Societies is a detailed exploration of genre development within the fields of dance, theatre, and opera in selected European countries during the decades before and after 1800. An introductory chapter outlines the theoretical and ideological background of genre thinking in Europe, starting from antiquity. A further fourteen chapters cover the performing genres as they developed in England, France, Germany, and Austria, and follow the dissemination and adaptation of the corresponding genres in minor and major cities in the Nordic countries. With a strong emphasis on the role that pragmatic and contextual factors had in defining genres, the book examines such subjects as the dancing masters in Christiania (Oslo), circa 1800, the repertory and travels of an itinerant acrobat and his wife in Norway in the 1760s, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas on bourgeois drama in Denmark. Including detailed analyses in the light of material, political, and social factors, this is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of musicology, opera studies, and theatre and performance studies.
Download or read book Shakespeare in Opera Ballet Orchestral Music and Song written by Arthur Graham and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is unique in the field: the reader is introduced to music from several centuries and to five of the most popular plays in great detail (Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream). Other plays are discussed (1 & 2 Henry IV, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice). It contains no musical notation and assumes no previous knowledge of music or of Shakespeare. It can be used in the classroom by a professor of English or of music. Suggested CD and video recordings are listed and keyed by page number to examples in the book.
Download or read book Six The Musical Vocal Selections written by and published by Hal Leonard. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Vocal Selections). Six has received rave reviews around the world for its modern take on the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII and it's finally opening on Broadway! From Tudor queens to pop princesses, the six wives take the mic to remix five hundred years of historical heartbreak into an exuberant celebration of 21st century girl power! Songs include: All You Wanna Do * Don't Lose Ur Head * Ex-Wives * Get Down * Haus of Holbein * Heart of Stone * I Don't Need Your Love * No Way * Six.
Download or read book Blumenfeld s Dictionary of Musical Theater written by Robert Blumenfeld and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2010 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you heard of the first American musical, "The Black Crook", which opened in 1866 and had fifteen revivals? Its chorus of ladies in pink tights was a sensation! Do you know Oscar Straus' hilarious parody of Wagner's Ring cycle, "Die lustigen Nibelungen" ("The Merry Nibelungs")? Do you know who the Ricci brothers, the Piccinni family, Edmond Audran, David Braham, or Francois-Joseph Gossec were? Look them up in this remarkable, thoroughly researched, lively book. Packed with nuggets of useful and fascinating information, with nearly 1,800 entries, this is a must-have research tool and handy reference for the theater and music lover, student, teacher, professional singer, director, and producer. Meant as a supplement and companion to Blumenfeld's "Dictionary of Acting and Show Business" (Limelight, 2009), this unique dictionary is chock-full of information about all the various genres of musical theater; thumbnail plot summaries of many well-known and some more obscure works; thumbnail biographies of composers and writers; and, dance, theatrical, and music terminology. Historical terms and foreign terms (with pronunciations) are included, along with information on available recordings of many obscure pieces. Convenient lists of the works of Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and many others are provided.
Download or read book A Chorus Line written by James Kirkwood and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1995 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Libretto Library). It is hard to believe that over 25 years have passed since A Chorus Line first electrified a New York audience. The memories of the show's birth in 1975, not to mention those of its 15-year-life and poignant death, remain incandescent and not just because nothing so exciting has happened to the American musical since. For a generation of theater people and theatergoers, A Chorus Line was and is the touchstone that defines the glittering promise, more often realized in lengend than in reality, of the Broadway way. This impressive book contains the complete book and lyrics of one of the longest running shows in Broadway history with a preface by Samuel Freedman, an introduction by Frank Rich and lots of photos from the stage production.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Giacomo Meyerbeer Operas Ballets Cantatas Plays written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was a great musical dramatist in his own right. The fame of his operas rests on his radical treatment of form, his development of scenic complexes and greater plasticity of structure and melody, his dynamic use of the orchestra, and close attention to all aspects of presentation and production, all of which set new standards in Romantic opera and dramaturgy. This book carries forward the process of rediscovery and reassessment of Meyerbeer‘s artincluding not just his famous French operas, but also his German and Italian ones placing them in the context of his entire dramatic oeuvre, including his ballets, oratorios, cantatas and incidental music. From Meyerbeer‘s first stage presentation in 1810 to his great posthumous accolade in 1865, some 24 works mark the unfolding of this life lived for dramatic music. The reputation of the famous four grand operas may well live on in the public consciousness, but the other works remain largely unknown. This book provides an approachable introduction to them. The works have been divided into their generic types for quick reference and helpful association, and placed within the context of the composer‘s life and artistic development. Each section unfolds a brief history of the work‘s origins, an account of the plot, a critical survey of some of its musical characteristics, and a record of its performance history. Robert Letellier examines each work from a dramaturgical view point, including the essential often challenging philosophical and historical elements in the scenarios, and how these concepts were translated musically onto the stage. A series of portraits and stage iconography assist in bringing the works to life.
Download or read book The Band s Visit written by and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Vocal Selections). Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, The Band's Visit is a musical adaptation of the 2007 Israeli film of the same name. This vocal selections folio features 11 vocal line arrangements with piano accompaniment composed by David Yazbek: Answer Me * The Beat of Your Heart * Haled's Song About Love * It Is What It Is * Itzik's Lullaby * Omar Sharif * Papi Hears the Ocean * Something Different * Soraya * Waiting * Welcome to Nowhere.
Download or read book The Musical Language of Italian Opera 1813 1859 written by William Rothstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though studying opera often requires attention to aesthetics, libretti, staging, singers, compositional history, and performance history, the music itself is central. This book examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, during the period from Rossini's first international successes to Italian unification. Detailed analyses of form, rhythm, melody, and harmony reveal concepts of musical structure different from those usually discussed by music theorists, calling into question the notion of a common practice. Taking an eclectic analytical approach, author William Rothstein uses ideas originating in several centuries, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first, to argue that operatic music can be heard not only as passionate vocality but also in terms of musical forms, pitch structures, and rhythmic patterns--that is, as carefully crafted music worth theoretical attention. Although no single theory accounts for everything, Rothstein's analysis shows how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice, one that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.
Download or read book The Phantom of the Opera written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and published by Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 1990 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Book of 2010s Broadway Musicals written by Dan Dietz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains detailed information about every musical that opened on Broadway from 2010 through the end of 2019. This book discusses the decade’s major successes, notorious failures, and musicals that closed during their pre-Broadway tryouts. In addition to including every hit and flop that debuted during the decade, this book highlights revivals and personal-appearance revues.
