Download or read book The Boston Castrato written by Colin W. Sargent and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Runner up: 2016 New England Book Festival Award, General Fiction This book does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in Ragtime: it grabs a city out of history, mixes in some fiction and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of Boston's Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians and utter rogues who raise the city from the dirt; it all mmers into reality as an outsider leads us into its quaking heart. Raffi, a young Italian, is our guide. He left more than his country behind in Rome. Snipped by a bishop as the last castrato, he is bundled off to America when the Church takes shame. Forbidden to use his voice, other skills steal him into the society of 1920s Boston. Raffi enters the hardest quest of all--the search for a genuine love song.
Download or read book The Castrato written by Martha Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.
Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time
Download or read book Observations on the Castrati in Britain written by Paul F. Rice and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the experiences of castrato singers in Britain during the long eighteenth-century. These singers stood apart from traditional cultural and sexual norms of the period by nature of their altered bodies. The work investigates the fears surrounding the possibility of Catholic influence in the nation, and the ability of sensual Italian operatic music to feminize the male population and weaken the country’s leaders. The castrato as a possible romantic rival to “normal” men is also discussed, while the contributions of the castrati to cultural leadership in the areas of teaching, concert direction and social influence are examined. This book will appeal to music historians and those interested in cultural and gender studies.
Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time
Download or read book The Marqu s the Divas and the Castrati written by Louise K. Stein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. During a crucial period in opera's development as a genre and as a business, the flamboyantly libertine Spanish aristocrat Gaspar de Haro y Guzm?n (1629-87), Marqu?s de Heliche and del Carpio, influenced operatic practices and productions for both Italian and Hispanic operas. A voracious collector of books and antiquities and famed connoisseur of visual art, the marqu?s financed operas in both Spain and Italy and further shaped them through his ideas, energy, and politics. His legacy also brought forth the first operas of the Americas, as posthumous revivals of the operatic genres he nurtured appeared in the Americas less than fifteen years after his death. In this book, author Louise K. Stein follows the trajectory of this first operatic producer to have shaped opera in two different worlds--Europe and the Americas--and in doing so, advances our musical and historical understanding of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century opera and cultural encounter. Each chapter focuses on different productions spearheaded by the Marqu?s in Madrid, Rome, and Naples during his lifetime, with the final chapter considering how his influence continued in operatic productions in Lima, Mexico City, and other regions of New Spain after his death. Alongside this portrait of the distinguish patron of the arts, Stein shows how conventions of musical dramaturgy for both private and commercial opera were developed within a consistent politics of production across the far-flung administrative centers of the Spanish empire in the years 1650-1730. She reveals the place of opera within the siglo de oro (Golden Age) of Hispanic theatre and delves deeply into how the Marqu?s became the principal patron of Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy after his time in Rome, sparking a reliable production system for Italian opera in Naples. Stein also addresses gendered performance--how beliefs about female fertility conditioned listeners and shaped the operatic genre--and advances the concept of the "womanly voice" in the first extant Hispanic operas, the Italian operas produced in Naples between 1683 and 1687, and the first operas of the Americas from 1701 to 1730.
Download or read book Musical America written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The journal of classical music.
Download or read book The NPR Listener s Encyclopedia of Classical Music written by Theodore Libbey and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A resource on classical music provides coverage of composers, works, musical terminology, and performers, along with recommended recordings and access to an interactive Web site that allows readers to listen to sample works, techniques, and performers discussed in the reference.
Download or read book Alessandro Moreschi and the Castrato Voice written by Robert Anthony Buning and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sartre written by David Drake and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated the cultural and literary life of post-war France. He believed from an early age that he had a mission to be a writer and proceeded to realize this as a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, literary and art critic, biographer, essayist, polemicist and journalist. Although before the Second World War, Sartre showed little inclination to become involved in politics, from 1945 he established himself as the very personification of intellectual commitment, taking public positions on national and international political issues from the Liberation until very shortly before his death. In this new biography, David Drake considers the works of Franceâs most famous twentieth-century intellectual, his relations with his contemporaries, and the political causes he espoused, all of which the author firmly locates in the turbulent times through which Sartre lived.
Download or read book Opera written by Guy A. Marco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-05-03 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.
Download or read book Vocal Virtuosity written by Sean M. Parr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Coloratura and Female Vocality -- The New Franco-Italian School of Singing -- Verdi and the End of Italian Coloratura -- Melismatic Madness and Technology -- Caroline Carvalho and Her World -- Carvalho, Gounod, and the Waltz -- Vestiges of Virtuosity : The French Coloratura Soprano -- Epilogue. Unending Coloratura.
Download or read book Red Hands written by Colin W. Sargent and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Hands is a deeply compelling tale of a woman caught inside the destruction of a regime. Iordana is a normal girl, brought up with all the perks of Romania's corrupt communist regime. Then she falls in love and marries the eldest son of her parents' arch-rival, Romania's monstrous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. They become the in-laws from hell, but she brings them their only grandson. And then there's the 1989 revolution, when crowds will kill anyone with the Ceausescu name. In all the blood and chaos, can Iordana keep her little son alive? Drawn from eighty hours of unique interviews and told in Iordana's own voice; a true-life tale that spins readers into the pleasures, excesses and horrors of late twentieth-century Europe.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Opera written by Helen M. Greenwald and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2014 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.
Download or read book Voice Machines written by Bonnie Gordon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The castrato phenomenon stretched from the late sixteenth century, when castrati first appeared in Italian courts and churches, through the eighteenth century, when they occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Throughout this time, the voice of the castrato--hailed as uniquely strong, flexible and expressive--contributed to a dramatic expansion of the musical vocabulary and to finding new ways to embody the poetic text. For us today, the castrato also highlights the porous relationship of voices and instruments/machines and the inherent materiality of sound. In her revealing study, Bonnie Gordon asks what it meant that the early-modern period produced a caste of technologically altered male singers and she uses the castrato as a critical provocation for asking questions about the interrelated histories of music, technology, sound, the limits of the human body, and what counts as human"--
Download or read book Schwann Opus written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 1142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Penguin Companion to Classical Music written by Paul Griffiths and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 1400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.
