Download or read book The Castrati In Opera written by Angus Heriot and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1975-04-21 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England written by Alanna Skuse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.
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 The World of the Castrati written by Patrick Barbier and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining, authoritative book is the first study of the phenomenon of the castrati in relation to the baroque period, covering the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries, when the fashion for castrati was at its peak.
Download or read book The Modern Castrato written by Patricia Howard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length biography of one of the most outstanding singers of the eighteenth century. Gaetano Guadagni is widely known for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck's 'Orfeo ed Euridice'; he was also a leading singer in Handel's oratorios, and worked with other progressive composers such as Traetta, Jommelli and Bertoni. His career coincided with a movement to reform heroic opera, with the intention of freeing dramatic music from restrictive conventions, and bringing it into harmony with the more expressive aims of the age of sensibility.
Download or read book The World of the Castrati written by Patrick Barbier and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining and authoritative study of the castrati during the baroque period explores the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries-their social origins, training, and relationship to society and church. Blending history and anecdote, it traces the course of a phenomenon that held Europe in its thrall. People were fascinated by these hybrids-part man, part woman, and part child-who became virile heroes on the operatic stage. The reader will learn of the horrors of castration, the nature of the strange castrato voice, and the conflicts these singers experienced.
Download or read book Voicing Gender written by Naomi Adele André and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the changes in approaches to gender in opera in the early 19th century.
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 Opera In The Flesh written by Sam Abel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, ‘These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.’ In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness written by Fred Everett Maus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.
Download or read book Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato written by Nicholas Clapton and published by Haus Pub.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the 'Angel of Rome,' Alessandro Moreschi was the last surviving castrato singer of the Vatican choir, and the only castrati whose voice was recorded. Its ethereal, haunting quality was highly prized for centuries in the papal basilicas and opera houses of Europe (readers can request a copy on CD using details in the book). The castrati tradition was established in Italy in the sixteenth century by Pope Clement VIII, and by the seventeenth century had moved onto the secular operatic stage, where castrato singers were feted as the 'pop stars' of their day. No other singers came close to matching their fame and notoriety. By the nineteenth century, however, their very existence had become an embarrassment, and when Moreschi himself joined the Sistine Chapel in 1883, there were only six castrati left inthe choir, and by 1903 they were officially no more. The strange and lonely life of Alessandro Moreschi was lived in the shadows of great events and great institutions, his personality glimpsed only by inference and allusion. Written by the acclaimed musicologist and countertenor Nicholas Clapton, this is a perceptive and informed study of the last survivor of a perennially intriguing part of Western cultural history. Clapton addresses the complexities inherent in such a complicated and historically neglected subject, establishing that castratisingers were an integral part of the lineage of Western music that should not be judged or condemned from the perspective of the twenty-first century. A professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music,Nicholas Clapton's career as a counter-tenor has seen him particularly involved in performing the repertoire of the great castrati. In 2006, he produced and presented a television documentary on the castrato voice for the BBC.
Download or read book Angels and Monsters written by Richard Somerset-Ward and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whether they were male or female, these singers wre amazing vertuosi, perhaps the greatest singers there have ever been - "angels." Unfortunately, some of them (and often the most famous) were also capable of behaving extremely badly, both on and off stage - "monsters." This book tells their colorful stories."--Jacket.
Download or read book Singers of Italian Opera written by John Rosselli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly $5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Rosselli also examines the sexist prejudices against the castrati of the eighteenth century and against women singers. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdote, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.
Download or read book Italy s Eighteenth Century written by Paula Findlen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.
Download or read book The Castrato written by Lawrence Goldman and published by John Day Company, Incorporated. This book was released on 1973 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Moreschi written by Nicholas Clapton and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the extraordinary sound of the voice of ‘the last castrato’ lies a strange and lonely life lived in the shadow of great events and institutions, a personality glimpsed by inference and allusion.
Download or read book Eunuchs and Castrati written by Piotr O. Scholz and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of the role of eunuchs in the households and courts of Greece, Rome, China, Byzantine, medieval Europe and the East, which aims to challenge traditional preconceptions about their duties.
