Download or read book The Politics of Opera in Post War Venice written by Harriet Boyd-Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Opera in Postwar Venice written by Harriet Boyd-Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.
Download or read book Modernising Opera written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1bis thesis explores operatic production in Venice's nascent postwar culture (1951- 1961). Although long sidelined as a site of political authority, Venice took on new life in the twentieth century, both as a hub of avant-garde activity and as a site of cultural recuperation. I begin with the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), an opera that provoked anxieties over memory and cultural heritage in a society trying to efface the past and em brace future-orientated mass media. Echoes of the past in the postwar period reverberate in the second chapter, which is on the revival of Verdi's Attila (1951). The performance became a focal part of contemporary concerns with posterity: an exhumed classic, a vehicle for rewriting Risorgimento history and a media event. The third chapter focuses on the premiere of three one-act music theatre pieces, commissioned by the 1959 music festival to alleviate widespread calls of opera crisis. Critics perceived the resultant works to be grounded in ideas of openness, diversity and eclecticism-a proto-neoavanguardia distinct from resurgent high modernism. The final chapter takes as its topic the premiere of Luigi Nona's lntolleranza 1960 (1961). Heralded by some as opera's salvation, Intolleranza was premised on a noisy realism that served not just as a locus of political memory, but also as a regeneration of older artistic forms in response to the increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. In sketching these four case studies, I construct a specific picture of opera at midcentury, one forged in the aftermath of war and in response to cultural and technological changes unforeseen in the Fascist period. I want to suggest, furthermore, a fleeting revitalisation of operatic culture, one filtered through a lugubrious rhetoric born of crisis, museography and dangerously beguiling mass media.
Download or read book Feasting Fasting in Opera written by Pierpaolo Polzonetti and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feasting and Fasting in Operashows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage. In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.
Download or read book Music and Democracy written by Marko Kölbl and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music and Democracy explores music as a resource for societal transformation processes. This book provides recent insights into how individuals and groups used and still use music to achieve social, cultural, and political participation and bring about social change. The contributors present outstanding perspectives on the topic: From the promise and myth of democratization through music technology to the use of music in imposing authoritarian, neoliberal or even fascist political ideas in the past and present up to music's impact on political systems, governmental representation, and socio-political realities. The volume further features approaches in the fields of gender, migration, disability, and digitalization.
Download or read book Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama written by Louis Bayman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.
Download or read book A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres 1660 1760 written by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.
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 Opera written by Virgil and published by . This book was released on 1544 with total page 1164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fascism the War and Structures of Feeling in Italy 1943 1945 written by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 25, 1943, news of Mussolini's resignation and subsequent arrest stunned Italians leaving them dumbfounded. After two decades, fascism had fallen without any advance warning. As festive events marked the incredible outcome and reminders of the past were destroyed, an uncontainable joy seemed to pervade Italians. But what did people actually celebrate? How did they understand the bygone dictatorship, which was soon to be reincarnated in the Italian Social Republic (RSI)? Drawing on more than one hundred diaries written by ordinary citizens (and some prominent figures as well) and inspired by Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling, the book examines Italians' perspectives on fascism at a very critical moment in their history. With the country mired in a devastating war further complicated by the September 8, 1943 armistice with the Allies and subsequent German occupation--followed by the eruption of an Italian-against-Italian conflict, the switching of alliances, and the declaration of war against Germany on October 13, 1943--the fast pace of history seemed to deflect Italians' attention from their immediate past. Amidst the daily experience of bombings, hunger, displacement, and death, coming to terms with twenty years of dictatorship turned out to be an arduous enterprise. Whether those who had lived under the fascist regime wished 'not to think of it and not to speak any more about it' as philosopher Benedetto Croce maintained, it is hard to ascertain. In truth, little is known of what Italians felt and thought about fascism after its precipitous demise. This book remedies the gap in historical scholarship by assessing how Italians confronted their present and negotiated their past during the two years from the fall of the regime to the definitive defeat of the RSI and the end of the world war in May 1945. By bringing to life the cultural imaginaries and practices of the past, the book raises ostensibly intractable questions on the epochal impact of what often appears as inconsequential: the typically unseen and seemingly banal power of everyday experiences.
Download or read book Awangarda written by Lisa Cooper Vest and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Opera written by Matthew Boyden and published by Rough Guides. This book was released on 2002 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sketches of opera composers, opera synopses, and CD reviews.
Download or read book Opera in Venice in the XVIIth Century written by Henry Prunières and published by . This book was released on 1931 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Middlebrow Modernism written by Christopher Chowrimootoo and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Download or read book Death in Venice an Opera in Two Acts written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Masculinity in Opera written by Philip Purvis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies since the late 1980s, and masculinity has been the focus of recent if sporadic musicological discussion, the relationship between masculinity and opera has so far escaped detailed critical scrutiny. Operating from a position of sympathy with feminist and queer approaches and the phallocentric tendencies they identify, this study offers a unique perspective on the cultural relativism of opera by focusing on the male operatic subject. Anchored by musical analysis or close readings of musical discourse, the contributions take an interdisciplinary approach by also engaging with theatre, popular music, and cultural musicology scholarship. The various musical, theoretical, and socio-political trajectories of the essays are historically dispersed from seventeenth to twentieth- first-century operatic works and practices, visiting masculinity and the operatic voice, the complication or refusal of essentialist notions of masculinity, and the operatic representation of the ‘crisis’ of masculinity. This volume will not only enliven the study of masculinity in opera, but be an appealing contribution to music scholars interested in gender, history, and new musicology.
