Download or read book Gioachino Rossini written by Denise Gallo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giochino Rossini: A Research and Information Guide is designed as a tool for those beginning to study the life and works of Gioachino Rossini as well as for those who wish to explore beyond the established biographies and commentaries. The first edition was published in 2001, and represented a survey of some 878 publications relating to the composer’s life and works. The second edition is revised and updated to include the more than 150 books and articles written in the field of Rossini studies since then. Contents range from sources published in the early decades of the nineteenth century to works currently in progress. General subject areas include Rossini's biography, historical and analytical studies of his operatic and non-operatic compositions, his personal and professional associations, and the reassessment of his role in the development of nineteenth-century music.

Download or read book Rossini written by Richard Osborne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rossini written by Emanuele Senici and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors written by Dan H. Marek and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794-1854) was a legendary tenor and the first 19th-century non-castrati male singer to become an international star of opera. The previous two centuries had been the era of the castrati, with tenors and basses relegated to character and supporting roles in the operas of their time. Rubini stood apart because he not only matched the castrati in coloratura and pathos, but he also had an extraordinarily high voice. With Rubini’s rise, and in his wake, several tenors came to sing roles written specifically for them by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and many other lesser-known bel canto composers. Signaling the end of the dominance of castrati on stage, this period would last some 40 years until the advent of Grand Opera, Wagner, and Verdi and the appearance of the first so-called High C from the chest by Gilbert-Louis Duprez in 1837. Since then, the accepted tenor sound has followed the tradition epitomized by Enrico Caruso and, in our own era, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Many composers, conductor, and performers would come to regard bel canto dramatic operas as decorative and vapid until Maria Callas and Tulio Serafin demonstrated the heights this genre of opera could reach. However, opera directors and opera performers of late who have expressed an interest in reviving selected masterpieces from the bel canto tradition have found themselves confronted with the problem of locating tenors versed in the vocal techniques necessary to carry the high tessituras. In Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors: History and Technique, Dan H. Marek explores the extraordinary life of Rubini in order to frame this special period in the history of opera and connect the technique of the castrati who were among Rubini’s instructors. Drawing on the work of Berton Coffin, Marek offers long-sought answers to the challenges presented by high tessitura of bel canto operas for tenors. To further assist working singers, Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors includes over 60 pages of exercises written by Rubini himself before 1840, which Marek, for the first time ever has adapted to acoustical phonetics. Professional singers, teachers and their students, vocal coaches, and opera conductors will find this work indispensable as the only English-language work on high tessitura for tenor and soprano singing.

Download or read book Michael Costa England s First Conductor written by John Goulden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the major changes that swept through the music industry during the mid-nineteenth century, one that has received little attention is how musical performances were managed and directed. Yet this was arguably the most radical change of all: from a loose control shared between the violin-leader, musical director and maestro al cembalo to a system of tight and unified control under a professional conductor-manager. This process brought with it not only baton conducting in its modern form, but also higher standards of training and discipline, a new orchestral lay-out and a more focused rehearsal regime. The resulting rise in standards of performance was arguably the greatest achievement of English music in the otherwise rather barren mid-Victorian period. The key figure in this process was Michael Costa, who built for himself unprecedented contractual powers and used his awesome personal authority to impose reform on the three main institutions of mid-Victorian music: the opera houses, the Philharmonic and the Sacred Harmonic Society. He was a central figure in the battles between the two rival opera houses, between the Philharmonic and the New Philharmonic, and between the venerable Ancient Concerts and the mass festival events of the Sacred Harmonic Society. Costa’s uniquely powerful position in the operatic, symphonic and choral world and the rapidity with which he was forgotten after his death provide a fascinating insight into the politics and changing aesthetics of the Victorian musical world.

Download or read book Bel Canto Bully written by Philip Eisenbeiss and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the "Viceroy of Naples", Barbaja was the influential force behind the careers of a plethora of artists including Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini and the great mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran. In this book, Eisenbeiss unlocks the enigma of this eccentric and fascinating personality that has been hitherto neglected.

Download or read book Gioachino Rossini s the Barber of Seville written by Hilary Poriss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. "Bravo Figaro, Bravo Bravissimo!" -- A Whirlwind of Change -- Early Revivals : Almaviva, Bartolo, and Their Many Ways -- The World of Rosina and the Prima Donna's Playground -- A Return to Rossini -- The Untethered Splendor of Il barbiere di Siviglia.

Download or read book The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini written by Nicholas Mathew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' – a symbolic duo, who represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast was to shape the composition, performance, reception and historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics of nineteenth-century music histories.

Download or read book Late Style and its Discontents written by Gordon McMullan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production--often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work. The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.

Download or read book Opera in Paris from the Empire to the Commune written by Mark Everist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-21 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in the history of French nineteenth-century stage music have blossomed in the last decade, encouraging a revision of the view of the primacy of Austro-German music during the period and rebalancing the scholarly field away from instrumental music (key to the Austro-German hegemony) and towards music for the stage. This change of emphasis is having an impact on the world of opera production, with new productions of works not heard since the nineteenth century taking their place in the modern repertory. This awakening of enthusiasm has come at something of a price. Selling French opera as little more than an important precursor to Verdi or Wagner has entailed a focus on works produced exclusively for the Paris Opéra at the expense of the vast range of other types of stage music produced in the capital: opéra comique, opérette, comédie-vaudeville and mélodrame, for example. The first part of this book therefore seeks to reintroduce a number of norms to the study of stage music in Paris: to re-establish contexts and conventions that still remain obscure. The second and third parts acknowledge Paris as an importer and exporter of opera, and its focus moves towards the music of its closest neighbours, the Italian-speaking states, and of its most problematic partners, the German-speaking states, especially the music of Weber and Wagner. Prefaced by an introduction that develops the volume’s overriding intellectual drivers of cultural exchange, genre and institution, this collection brings together twelve of the author’s previously published articles and essays, fully updated for this volume and translated into English for the first time.

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 The Urbanization of Opera written by Anselm Gerhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-08-15 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many operas end in suicide, murder, and death? Why do many characters in large-scale operas exhibit neurotic behaviors worthy of psychoanalysis? Why are the legendary grands operas - much celebrated in their time - so seldom performed today?

Download or read book Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750 1850 written by Tom Mole and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring how our modern idea of celebrity was created in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Download or read book Music in the Present Tense written by Emanuele Senici and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.

Download or read book The Voice of the Century written by Massimo Zicari and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fields of performance studies, empirical musicology, and the musicology of recordings have seen a tremendous development in recent years, shedding new light on the recent history of our performing tradition and conveying essential information to music practitioners, critics and audiences. This innovative work considers the notion of bel canto and the manner in which this vibrant tradition lives in the records of Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940), one of the most celebrated sopranos ever. Tetrazzini, whose discographic career includes about 120 recordings, belongs to that generation of inspirational performers who heralded the dawn of a new era of music appreciation, alongside such iconic figures as Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. Drawing on a vast body of scholarship and a number of contemporary reviews, Massimo Zicari establishes Tetrazzini’s role in the Italian operatic tradition and its much disputed set of performing conventions. His transcriptions of her recorded interpretations from Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi will prove invaluable to singers and conductors interested in a tradition that goes back to legendary figures such as Jenny Lind and Maria Malibran. The author also discusses her voice quality and technique, tempo flexibility, her use of vibrato and portamento—features of musical performance that question several widely-held, normative views about aesthetics and interpretative tradition. The volume includes eighty-eight musical examples and its closing section consists of the vocal scores of thirteen operatic arias. The musical material (both examples and transcriptions) is entirely original. This unique approach seeks to combine an academic perspective with the making of the music, in the hope that the plea for originality may be enhanced by models from the past.

Download or read book The Birth of an Opera Fifteen Masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck written by Michael Rose and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Birth of an Opera offers illuminating insight into how operas are written and the personalities, incidents, and musical circumstances that have shaped their composition. Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers—Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation. Rather than retreading familiar ground with pages of historical and musical analysis, Rose places each opera firmly in the context of the composer’s life and provides an engaging text in which the varied and colorful personalities involved are seen to discuss, comment, and contribute in one way or another to the progress of its composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Otello; and Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelléas et Mélisande. Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing he captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity, and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera’s most enduring masterpieces.

Download or read book On Music Money and Markets written by Thomas Baumert and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that Bach invested in mines? That Rossini improved his income by running casinos in the opera houses which on weekends performed his operas? Or that Puccini composed shorter arias to make them fit the length of gramophone disks as they reported him huge revenues? Or who was, in financial terms, the most successful classical composer in history? This book —the first of its kind— studies and compares the finances of twenty classical composers in their historical and economical context. Each chapter details and quantifies the sources of income of these musicians (wages, royalties, subsidies, percentages over the number of performances, arrangements, investments in the musical sector, etc), thus allowing to estimate the income they obtained due to their artistic — primarily compositional, but also related— activities. In addition, it also estimates the composer’s expenditures, thus drawing a relatively complete image of their personal finances. This not only allows to conclude to create a ranking of composers according to their economic success, but —more importantly— for the first time gives an accurate image of the financial situation of a broad set of composers. This allows to correct many false believes while also giving new insights on the relation between economics and music history.