Download or read book The Operas of Puccini written by William Ashbrook and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The performance history of each of Puccini's operas are reviewed and related to events in his life.
Download or read book Puccini A Listener s Guide written by John Bell Young and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is a slightly altered republication of the work originally published by Amadeus Press, New York, in 2008."
Download or read book The Romantic World of Puccini written by Iris J. Arnesen and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Puccini, composer of some of the world's most popular operas, including La Boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly, was also a highly literary person who based his librettos on existing works of literature. This work explores that literary inheritance in an effort to enhance the listener's appreciation of the operatic experience. The author argues that the majority of Puccini's operas compose a grand cycle that finds its roots in the romance genre of 12th century France, serving to celebrate the strong, independent heroine. Via a close examination of the source works, the librettos, and the scores, this book offers fresh perspective on Puccini's legacy.
Download or read book Puccini s Operas written by Merritt Wilson and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera was and still is one of the oldest forms of entertainment. It’s been around longer than any other art form known to mankind, longer than radio, the internet, video games, television and even movies. It’s an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining a script called a libretto and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates music, singing, scenery, costumes and sometimes dancing. Some operas have spoken dialogue called a Singspiel in which the singers talk between songs aka arias. Other operas have a singing style called a Recitative in which the singers imitate spoken dialogue by singing their lines instead of talking.
Download or read book Puccini written by Mosco Carner and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and works of Giacomo Puccini, composer of La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Turandot, and other universal operatic favorites, are here presented in detail for the first time in any language in a book unlikely ever to be superseded. A full-length recounting of Puccini's fascinating life, rich in previously unused materials, is followed by detailed analyses of each of his operas and other compositions. The author, a Viennese conductor and musicologist, has performed this monumental task with knowledge, grace, and insight. The biography brings to life a curious, somewhat ambiguous man whose greatly successful career was marked alternately by storms, tragedies, and triumphs, a genius who somehow missed the final greatness. His relations with his family, colleagues, librettists, singers, conductors--and his peculiar, convoluted relationship with his wife--have some of the very drama that has made his operas so enduringly popular. Puccini's letters are quoted extensively, many of them in English for the first time. The opera analyses, constantly evaluating the music in terms of drama and libretto, are unique in musical literature and in their completeness and illumination. They are, furthermore, judicious and soundly musical, for instead of accepting ready-made opinions (many of which are quoted), they go directly to the scores themselves.
Download or read book Puccini written by Julian Budden and published by Master Musicians. This book was released on 2005 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julian Budden provides a look at the process of putting an opera together, the cut-and-slash of nineteenth-century Italian opera, -the struggle to find the right performers for the debut of La Boheme, Puccini's anxiety about completing Turandot (he in fact died of cancer before he did so), and his animosity toward his rival Leoncavallo (whom he called Leonasino or "lion-ass"). Budden provides an analysis of the operas themselves, examining the music act by act. He highlights, among other things, the influence of Wagner on Puccini--alone among his Italian contemporaries, Puccini followed Wagner's example in bringing the motif into the forefront of his narrative, sometimes voicing the singer's unexpressed thoughts, sometimes sending out a signal to the audience of which the character is unaware. And Budden also paints a portrait of Puccini the man--talented but modest, a man who had friends from every walk of life: shopkeepers, priests, wealthy landowners, fellow artists. --From publisher's description.
Download or read book Puccini s La fanciulla del West and American Musical Identity written by Kathryn M. Fenton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 10 December 1910, Giacomo Puccini’s seventh opera, La fanciulla del West, had its premiere before a sold-out audience at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. The performance was the Metropolitan Opera Company’s first world premiere by any composer. By all accounts, the premiere was an unambiguous success and the event itself recognized as a major moment in New York cultural history. The initial public opinion matched Puccini’s own evaluation of his opera. He called it "the best he had ever written" and expected it to become as popular as La Bohème. Yet the music reviews tell a different story. Marked by ambivalence, the reviews expose the New York City critics’ struggle to reconcile the opera they expected to see with the one they actually saw, and the opera itself became embroiled in controversy over the essence of musical Americanness and the nativist perception that a uniquely American national opera tradition continued to elude both American- and foreign-born opera composers. This book seeks to account for the differences between Puccini’s own assessments of the opera and those of its first audience. Offering transcriptions of the central reviews and of letters unavailable elsewhere, the book provides a historically informed understanding of La fanciulla del West and the reception of this European work as it intersected with both opera production and consumption in the United States and with the process of American musical identity formation during the very period that Americans actively sought to eradicate European cultural influences. As such, it offers a window into the development of nativism and "cosmopolitan nationalism" in New York City’s musical life during the first decade of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Giacomo Puccini written by Linda Beard Fairtile and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Puccini s the Girl of the Golden West la Fanciulla Del West written by Burton D. Fisher and published by Opera Journeys Publishing. This book was released on 2002-06 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A newly translated Libretto featuring foreign language/English side-by-side, and music examples interspersed throughout the text.
Download or read book Puccini s Tosca written by Michael Steen and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tosca's première in Rome in January 1900 was nearly disrupted by a terrorist threat to blow up Italy's King Umberto. Victorien Sardou had written the melodrama for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Giacomo Puccini's popular opera is a tale of sadism and brutality, torture, attempted rape, murder, an execution and two suicides. 'Realism' was in vogue: Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana had been a great success, as had Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. With sharp practice, the publisher Giulio Ricordi obtained 'Tosca' for Puccini, who had already composed Manon Lescaut and La Bohème. The story, set in the Napoleonic, era was ideal for Puccini, a chain-smoker who enjoyed women, shooting birds, and high-speed motor cars. A political prisoner seeks sanctuary in the church where prima donna Floria Tosca's lover Cavaradossi, a role associated with Pavarotti, is painting a picture of Mary Magdalen. In Va, Tosca! the police chief Scarpia fantasises about Tosca during a Te Deum celebrating Napoleon's victory. Tosca stabs Scarpia following the famous operatic aria, Vissi d'arte, immortalised by Maria Callas on stage and in the film produced by Franco Zeffirelli. Awaiting death before dawn in the Castel Sant'Angelo, Cavaradossi sings the well-known arias E lucevan le stelle and O dolci mani. Tosca's attempt to save him comes to nothing. Written by Michael Steen, author of the acclaimed The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, 'Short Guides to Great Operas' are concise, entertaining and easy to read. They are packed with useful information and informed opinion, helping to make you a truly knowledgeable opera-goer, and so maximising your enjoyment of a great musical experience. Other 'Short Guides to Great Operas' that you may enjoy include La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Carmen.
Download or read book Opera and the Golden West written by John Louis DiGaetani and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera and the Golden West is a celebration of opera's difficult past in America. It focuses in part on early repertory and how European operatic masterpieces became part of American culture. This book also calls attention to the efforts of American composers as they continually tried to make original contributions to a foreign musical form. Throughout this anthology the contributors use a variety of approaches and styles to analyze the many aspects of opera, and how the form fared in the U.S. In addition to observing where opera has been in this country, this anthology also has an eye to the future. Opera presentation in the coming century may be very different from the current experience. Economics, always a critical factor, may well dictate a different scale of production. Changing tastes in directorial and production values and the expansion of television and video into the home are indicators that a new era has arrived.
Download or read book Giacomo Puccini Tosca written by Mosco Carner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-09-05 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide for opera goers to Tosca, which includes a synopsis of the plot and discussions on style.
Download or read book Play Puccini written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Instrumental Play-Along). Who needs a singer? With Play Puccini , instrumentalists can bathe themselves in luxurious Italian melody! These ten opera arias are among the composer's most famous and distinctive achievements, here transcribed for intermediate level solo instrument and piano. The book includes a biography of Puccini, notes about the plot of each opera, and the dramatic context of the selected aria. The companion CD features excellent performances, as well as piano accompaniments for practice. Includes arias from: La Boheme , La Fanciulla Del West , Gianni Schicchi , Madama Butterfly , Manon Lescaut , Suor Angelica , Tosca and Turandot .
Download or read book Opera at Movie Theaters 2014 2015 Season written by and published by Opera Journeys Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to operas simulcast and/or screened by the Met Opera, Royal Opera House, et al, during the 2014-2015 season. Over 17 operas, each including Principal Characters, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples and Burton D. Fisher's insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis.
Download or read book Music s Obedient Daughter written by Sabine Lichtenstein and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.
Download or read book The Schubert Treatment written by Claire Oppert and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Oliver Sacks and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande comes “a luminous ode to the ‘mysterious ways music... moves’ patients with such conditions as dementia and autism… Assured and lyrical, this impresses."—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review A celebrated art therapist plays the cello for her patients—and offers a moving reflection on the extraordinary power of music to enrich our lives, all the way to the very end. When Claire Oppert plays the cello, miracles happen. Children with profound autism, patients in extreme pain and distress, even people on the threshold of death smile, cry, laugh, sing and dance. “When you play, I’m not sick anymore,” one man tells her. “I feel happy, I feel alive.” In The Schubert Treatment, Oppert recounts her remarkable story of healing suffering through music, alongside portraits of the many people she has helped. Born into a family of doctors and artists, Oppert trained as a classical cellist and began playing at a center for autistic youth, where she witnessed how music could connect with even the most difficult-to-reach patients. Later, she began working as an art therapist with people with neurodegenerative diseases and palliative care patients, eventually conducting clinical trials that proved the effect of her “Schubert treatment”: using music as a counter-stimulation to reduce pain and anxiety during stressful procedures. Oppert’s crystalline, lyrical vignettes of the patients whose lives she has touched are punctuated with anecdotes from her own life as a musician, as well as reflections on the meaning of art and the human need for connection and creativity. Compassionate, uplifting, and deeply humane, The Schubert Treatment is a testament to the incredible power of music to heal our bodies, minds, and souls.
Download or read book Opera Journeys Guide Opera at Movie Theaters Season 2013 2014 written by Burton D. Fisher and published by Opera Journeys Publishing. This book was released on with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
