Download or read book The Complete Libretti in Eleven Volumes Grand op ra 2 Les Huguenots written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier. In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of use. The eleventh volume presents the fourth of Meyerbeerâ (TM)s grands opÃ(c)ras, and his final work. By 1860 long-imposed labor had started to tell upon the composerâ (TM)s health: he knew that he must concentrate on the â oenavigator projectâ which he had started twenty years earlier if he intended to finish it. Meyerbeer died on 2 May 1864, the day after the completion of the copying of the full score of this his last opera, Vasco da Gama. Minna Meyerbeer and CÃ(c)sar-Victor Perrin, the director of the OpÃ(c)ra, entrusted the editing of a performing edition to the famous Belgian musicologist François-Joseph FÃ(c)tis, while the libretto was revised by MÃ(c)lesville. The original title of Lâ (TM)Africaine was restored out of deference to public expectation. Much of the music and action was suppressed, in spite of the strain this inflicted on the internal logic of the story. While L'Africaine is not lacking in the grandeur of statement and stirring climaxes for which the composer was so famous, there is a new intimacy, a new intensity of melancholic lyricism. Like its famous predecessors, it is basically an historical work, derived from the period of sixteenth-century Renaissance. The account of Vasco da Gama's voyage of discovery around the Cape of Good Hope and conquest of Calicut (1497-98) is subjected to a fictional treatment that raises many interesting issues. The framework is historical, but most of the characters and course of action are not; in fact the end of the opera, in the suicide of the heroine, suddenly leaves the terra firma of reality, and transports us into the mystical realms of the spirit. It is this mixture of modes that is central to the dramaturgy of L'Africaine, a confusion of history and fairytale, ancient certainties and challenging discoveries, in the creation of a new mythology. There is also originality in formal developments, with the great tenor scene in act 4 providing a new malleability in handling the constraints of shape and genre: recitative, arioso and cabaletta have a fluent integration in trying to explore the text more pointedly. Lâ (TM)Africaine was produced on 28 April 1865, a great posthumous tribute to its famous creators. The Ship Scene, the exotic Indian act, and the Scene of the Manchineel Tree exerted a fascination on audiences, and elicited new praise. The work full of melodic beauty and rapturous lyricism, began a triumphal progress through the world, beginning with the big stages of London and Berlin.
Download or read book Meyerbeer s Italian Operas written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer is the only composer who wrote for three different and equally important eras of 19th century music. His works straddle the German Romantic school, Italian bel canto and French grand opera and opéra-comique. After his early career in Berlin, Darmstadt, Munich and Vienna, Meyerbeer famously travelled to Italy where he lived for ten years. His six operas written between 1817 and 1824 established Meyerbeer as a significant composer in Italy, with an international reputation growing more or less incrementally with each new work. The treasures of these works have been rediscovered in recent decades (1979-2019). This study examines these works in terms of origins, content and performance history.
Download or read book The Literary World written by and published by . This book was released on 1851 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera written by David Charlton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-04 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Marco Clemente Pellegrini and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide has resulted from years of research on the papers and music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and aims to provide a bibliographical aid and point of reference for further research. The first part presents the private papers connected to the composer and his principal librettist, Eugène Scribe—both archival and printed, with working papers and correspondence, as found in Berlin, Paris and some of the famous libraries of the world. The body of Part 2 draws together all the known resources on Meyerbeer's life and historical reputation—from full scale biographies and entries in reference books, through critical discussions to website resources to records of symposia. The third part provides material about his background with its unique mixture of Jewish and Prussian elements, the powerful role of the city of Berlin in his life and work. The fourth part lists bibliographic material for Meyerbeer's music, looking at his operas, grouped as German, Italian and French, with each individual entry providing a record of the scores available, both modern and historical, the various arrangements made from the operas during the heyday of their popularity, reviews of modern performances, discography, and bibliography of studies and publications pertinent to the wider cultural and historical contexts of the works. The next two sections constitute an extended record of material pertinent to the contemporaries of Meyerbeer. In the fifth section are select bibliographies of composers, authors, artists, performers, politicians, those who played some part in the composer's life, or anyone of significance in his wider contemporary circumstances. This is continued in the sixth part where the cultural and aesthetic elements of the composer's milieu, or life in the theatre during seventy years of the nineteenth century, are listed. The seventh part adds a bibliography of social and historical background, where the incidental issues of Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe, and the wider political, historical and geographical circumstances of Meyerbeer's life, his relentless travelling, and closely recorded experiences in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, England, and Austria. The eighth section provides a thematic key to this extensive material. Part 9 provides an extended tripartite series of lists of the published scores, arrangements and some special studies of Meyerbeer over the period 1820 to 2005—in alphabetical, chronological and thematic ordering. The last two sections furnish the modern equivalent of this record of Meyerbeer and his compositions, showing in Part 11 the list of performances of his operas since the Second World War, and in Part 12, listing the recordings of the operas, both commercial and private, for the same period. The thirteenth and last section is iconographical, pictures that represent an interesting survey of the popular response to Meyerbeer in the 19th century.
Download or read book The National Union Catalog Pre 1956 Imprints written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Werner s Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Athenaeum written by and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 1628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stradella written by Friedrich von Flotow and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New York Weekly Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Werner s Voice Magazine written by Edgar S. Werner and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Martha written by Wilhelm Friedrich Riese and published by . This book was released on 1929 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Les Huguenots written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 1006 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This huge exploration of faith, tolerance, hatred, extermination, love, loyalty, self-sacrifice and hope in despair, is the first panel of a central diptych on the Reformation, and the heart of the wider tetralogy of Meyerbeer’s grand operas, where issues of power, religion and love are examined in a variety of modes. For five years after the sensational première of Robert le Diable, Meyerbeer was thought to be resting on his laurels. Instead, he was drudging over a gigantic drama, partly adapted by Scribe from Merimée's Chronique de Charles IX. It was hardly believed possible that the esrlier success could be repeated. Most of the vivid details gleaned from every available document related to the time, were the composer's contribution to Les Huguenots. The music for this sombre tapestry of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre springs from the core of the vivid action and creates a panoramic alternation of moods, that capture the tragedy of religious intolerance and personal anguish in one of the most fraught events in history when some 30,000 French Protestants were murdered during the night of 24 August 1574. Meyerbeer’s music rises to occasion, and reaches sublime heights of music drama, especially in the fourth and fifth acts, with the Benediction of the Catholic Daggers—one of the most electrical scenes in all opera—the more powerful Love Duet, and the trio of martyrdom in the last moments of the opera. Spectacle was incorporated in the plot, in Meyerbeer’s concern to conjure up the couleur locale of those heroic times. The evocation of Marguerite de Valois’s court at Chenonceaux, the recreation of late Medieval Parisian life with its Gypsy revels and the religionists' riots in the Pré-aux-Clercs, the wedding fete in the Hotel de Nesle, all grow out of the central idea. Meyerbeer was also very successful in his characterizations of individuals: the dreamy idealist Raoul, the passionate and self-sacrificing Valentine, the fanatical and implacable St Bris, the rough stolid Marcel, the elegant and capricious queen, the somewhat flamboyant but always honorable Nevers. All come to life in this score. The opera became enormously popular, its various arias a touchstone of operatic lyricism, and by 1936 had been performed 1120 times in at the Paris Opéra alone. In spite of its overwhelming dramatic power and instrumental riches of the score, the most significant aspect of the work came to regarded the supremacy of the vocal parts. Performances at the Metropolitan Opera in new York during the 1890s were among the the most famous in operatic history. Here performances attained a legendary status, the so-called nuits des sept étoiles (“the Nights of the Seven Stars”), as in 1894 with Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, Sofia Scalchi, Jean de Reszke, Edouard de Reszke, Pol Plançon, and Victor Maurel Once again George Sand summed up with incomparable insight the essence of Meyerbeer’s musico-dramatic achievement. “From stone floors that no Protestant knee ever warms, solemn voices seemed to resound, the tones of a calm, secure triumph and the expiring sighs and murmurings of a tranquil end, resigned, confident, without death-rattle or lamentation. It was the voice of Calvinist martyrdom, a martyrdom without ecstasy or delirium, a torment where suffering is stifled by austere pride and august certainty... These imaginary hymns naturally assumed in my mind the form of that fine canticle in your opera, The Huguenots; and, while I dreamt I heard the cries of Catholic indignation and a sharp volley of musketry outside, a tall figure passed before my eyes, one of the noblest dramatic figures, one of the loveliest personifications of the idea of faith that art has ever produced in our time: Meyerbeer's Marcel. And I saw that bronze statue standing clothed in buffalo hide, quickened by the divine fire the composer had brought down upon him. I saw him, Maestro, forgive me my presumption, just as he must have appeared to you when you sought him at the uncompromising and steadfast hour of noon under the glowing arches of some Protestant church, vast and luminous as this one. Though you are a musician, you are more a poet than any of us! In what secret recess of your soul, in what hidden treasury of your mind did you find those clear, pure features, that concept, simple as antiquity, true as history, lucid as conscience, strong as faith? ....” The facsimile edition of the manuscript of this famous work, for so long kept private and then thought lost after the Second World War, enables lovers of opera to examine for themselves the compositional procedure of its great and often misunderstood creator. One can see the extent to which curtailment of the original conception was needed on the eve of the premiere: in the ensembles of both act 1 and 3 Meyerbeer’s complex developments had to be reduced. The ever present problem of censorship also meant that the original idea of depicting Catherine de’ Medici on stage as the instigator of the massacre had to be radically altered and her role substituted by the Comte de Saint Bris. The famous viola d’amore accompaniment to Raoul’s rhapsodic act 1 romance (“Plus blanche que la blanche hermine”) was originally conceived for the cello. The extraordinary Andante amoroso for the central part of the love duet also indicates Meyerbeer’s preparedness to act on a good idea: in this case Adolphe Nourrit’s suggestion that the cantabile be expanded. To see the MS of such a famous opera is both a moving and stimulating experience.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Giacomo Meyerbeer Operas Ballets Cantatas Plays written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was a great musical dramatist in his own right. The fame of his operas rests on his radical treatment of form, his development of scenic complexes and greater plasticity of structure and melody, his dynamic use of the orchestra, and close attention to all aspects of presentation and production, all of which set new standards in Romantic opera and dramaturgy. This book carries forward the process of rediscovery and reassessment of Meyerbeer‘s artincluding not just his famous French operas, but also his German and Italian ones placing them in the context of his entire dramatic oeuvre, including his ballets, oratorios, cantatas and incidental music. From Meyerbeer‘s first stage presentation in 1810 to his great posthumous accolade in 1865, some 24 works mark the unfolding of this life lived for dramatic music. The reputation of the famous four grand operas may well live on in the public consciousness, but the other works remain largely unknown. This book provides an approachable introduction to them. The works have been divided into their generic types for quick reference and helpful association, and placed within the context of the composer‘s life and artistic development. Each section unfolds a brief history of the work‘s origins, an account of the plot, a critical survey of some of its musical characteristics, and a record of its performance history. Robert Letellier examines each work from a dramaturgical view point, including the essential often challenging philosophical and historical elements in the scenarios, and how these concepts were translated musically onto the stage. A series of portraits and stage iconography assist in bringing the works to life.
Download or read book The Athen um written by and published by . This book was released on 1850 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dwight s Journal of Music written by John Sullivan Dwight and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Illustrated London News written by and published by . This book was released on 1863 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
