Download or read book From the Score to the Stage written by Evan Baker (Opera historian) and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life--by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, From the Score to the Stage follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people--composers, librettists, designers, and technicians--as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, From the Score to the Stage is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.
Download or read book The Opera Stage of Sarah Caldwell written by Kristina Bendikas and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Caldwell, the leader of the Opera Company of Boston from 1958-1990, was a groundbreaking and idiosyncratic woman who established her own career as a conductor and stage director in an environment resistant to change. This book investigates her choices as an opera director, her influences, her philosophies, and her methods, and situates her work within the history of opera in America. Though she is remembered primarily as a conductor, her passion, and her greater influence on American opera, was through stage directing. With a repertoire that included ground-breaking interpretations of works such as Nono's Intolleranza 1960, Prokofiev's War and Peace, and Bernstein's Mass, Caldwell continually pushed her own artistic limits, provoked critics, intrigued audiences, and challenged the status quo of opera production. Her passion for opera, her creative use of new technology and her influence in bringing opera to all sectors of American society, culminated in 1997 when she was awarded the National Medal of Arts for her work as a pioneering woman in the American musical landscape, and a tireless and innovative arts entrepreneur.
Download or read book Performing Opera written by Michael Ewans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.
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 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 Last Five Years The Applause Libretto Library written by and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Willis' Screen World has become the definitive reference for any film library. Each volume includes every significant U.S. and international film released during that year as well as complete filmographies capsule plot summaries cast and characters credits production company month released rating and running time. You'll also find biographical entries ä a prices reference for over 2 000 living stars including real name school place and date of birth. A comprehensive index makes this the finest film publication that any film lover could own.
Download or read book The Barber of Seville written by and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Mapping Artistic Networks written by Tatiana Korneeva and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The essays in this collection are selected and revised versions of papers first presented at the conference 'Mapping Artistic Networks of Italian Theatre and Opera Across Europe, 1600-1800' held at the Freie Universität Berlin in 11-12 April 2019"--Page 21
Download or read book Concert Halls and Opera Houses written by Leo Beranek and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated guide to 100 of the world's most important concert halls and opera houses examines their architecture and engineering and discusses their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. The descriptions and photographs will serve as a valuable guide for today's peripatetic performers and music lovers. With technical discussions relegated to appendices, the book can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in musical performance. The photographs (specially commissioned for this book) and architectural drawings (all to the same scale) together with modern acoustical data on each of the halls provide a rich and unmatched resource on the design of halls for presenting musical performances. Together with the technical appendices, the data and drawings will serve as an invaluable reference for architects and engineers involved in the design of spaces for the performance of music.
Download or read book Opera in a Multicultural World written by Mary Ingraham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through historical and contemporary examples, this book critically explores the relevance and expressions of multicultural representation in western European operatic genres in the modern world. It reveals their approaches to reflecting identity, transmitting meaning, and inspiring creation, as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that occur across the time and place(s) of their performance. This collection brings academic researchers in opera studies into conversation with previously unheard voices of performers, critics, and creators to speak to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the genre. Together, they deliver a powerful critique of the perpetuation of the values and practices of dominant cultures in operatic representations of intercultural encounters. Essays accordingly cross methodological boundaries in order to focus on a central issue in the emerging field of coloniality: the hierarchies of social and political power that include the legacy of racialized practices. In theorizing coloniality through intercultural exchange in opera, authors explore a range of topics and case studies that involve immigrant, indigenous, exoticist, and other cultural representations and consider a broad repertoire that includes lesser-known Canadian operas, Chinese- and African-American performances, as well as works by Haydn, Strauss, Puccini, and Wagner, and in performances spanning three continents and over two centuries. In these ways, the collection contributes to the development of a more integrated understanding of the interdisciplinary fields inherent in opera, including musicology, sociology, anthropology, and others connected to Theatre, Gender, and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book Divas and Scholars written by Philip Gossett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett’s personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas. Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrall both aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it—in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.
Download or read book Fire Shut Up in My Bones written by Charles M. Blow and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A respected journalist describes the abuse he suffered at the hands of a close family relative, the effect this had on his formative years and how he overcame the anger and self-doubt it left behind.
Download or read book Opera written by Franklin Mesa and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia includes entries for 1,153 world premiere (and other significant) performances of operas in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Russia. Entries offer details about key persons, arias, interesting facts, and date and location of each premiere. There is a biographical dictionary with 1,288 entries on historical and modern operatic singers, composers, librettists, and conductors. Fully indexed and with a bibliography.
Download or read book Grand Illusion written by Gabriela Cruz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and groundbreaking historical narrative, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores how technical innovations in Paris transformed the grand opera into a transcendent, dream-like audio-visual spectacle.
Download or read book The Gilded Stage written by Daniel Snowman and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascinating and highly readable, this is the definitive social history of the world's most romantic, flamboyant, glamorous, and politically influential art-form: opera From its beginnings in the Renaissance cities of northern Italy opera has permeated through Europe, America, and beyond, becoming a global business in the digital age. This history unwraps the story of opera from the charm and chaos of Mozart's Vienna to Frederick the Great's Berlin. It covers the lure of fin-de-siècle Paris, the rough and tumble of the Australian outback, and the new world of the Americas—colorful backdrops to the always dramatic, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious episodes that make up this rich and fascinating story.
Download or read book Concert and Opera Halls written by Leo Leroy Beranek and published by American Institute of Physics. This book was released on 1996 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated guide examines the acoustical quality of some of the world's most important concert and opera halls and reveals how composers and musicians adapt their art to complement the acoustics of their surroundings.
