Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer The years of celebrity 1850 1856 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 3 covers a time span that preeminently represents the period in the composer's life known as The Years of International Fame (1850-56). Confirmed as the major figure on the operatic scene, and freed from the more onerous duties of his official position, Meyerbeer was able to enjoy his most remarkable period of stability and renown, as the detailed and absorbing diary entries reveal. These years saw the composing, rehearsing, and staging of L'Etoile du Nord (1854), and his personal supervision of major productions in London, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Vienna.
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 2002-03-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 3 covers a time span that preeminently represents the period in the composerOs life known as OThe Years of International FameO (1850-56).
Download or read book Grand Illusion written by Gabriela Cruz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Renowned opera scholar Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling in a way never before experienced in the opera house, asserting that the concept of "spectacle" was the defining cultural apparatus of the art form after the 1820s. Parisian audiences at the Académie Royale de Musique were struck by the novelty and power of grand opera upon the introduction of gaslight illumination, a technological innovation that quickly influenced productions across the Western operatic world. With this innovation, grand opera transformed into an audio-visual spectacle, delivering dream-like images and evoking the ghosts of its audiences' past. Through case studies of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi, Cruz demonstrates how these works became an increasingly sophisticated medium by which audiences could conjure up the past and be transported away from the breakdown of modern life. A historically informed narrative that traverses far and wide, from dingy popular theatres in post-revolutionary Paris, to nautical shows in London, and finally to Egyptian mummies, Grand Illusion provides a fresh departure from previous scholarship, highlighting the often-neglected visual side of grand opera.
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer The last years 1857 1864 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 4 is devoted to the last years (1857-64); while age and declining health saw a waning of the composer's personal optimism. It contains a series of glossaries listing his compositions and the musical and theatrical works he attended throughout his life, as well as a bibliography.
Download or read book Meyerbeer Studies written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1936 Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots achieved its 1,120[superscript th] performance at the Paris Opera. This extraordinary record is an indication of the vast fame and influence of its composer who was once a household name, like Verdi or Puccini. Now he is unknown to the ordinary opera lover. These essays represent something of an odyssey to seek out and know the shadowy figure behind so much divided opinion and long neglect. They represent attempts, at various stages over thirty years, to find Meyerbeer and enter the world of his remarkable operatic creations that once so characterized the musical life of European civilization."--Jacket.
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 Technology and the Diva written by Karen Henson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the operatic soprano as the diva and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the digital age.
Download or read book Paris a Concise Musical History written by Guy Hartopp and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris, the City of Light, is one of the most romantic cities in the world. The millions of visitors which flock to the French capital every year follow in the footsteps of countless artists, writers and composers who for centuries have been drawn to this magnificent city. Some composers, Chopin and Rossini among them, found success and contentment, and remained in Paris for the rest of their lives. But for others, Paris brought nothing but disappointment and disillusionment. Mozart, who came to Paris as a 22-year-old seeking a permanent position, was so bitter about the cavalier manner in which he was treated that he professed an aversion to all things French until the end of his days. Wagner was so upset by his treatment here that he once described Paris as "a pit into which the spirit of the nation has subsided." And yet he was drawn back to the city time and again. This book charts the musical history of Paris. It discusses the composer and musicians, both French and foreign, who were drawn here and the impact they made on the world of music, on this great city, and vice versa. It includes a wealth of biographical details, including where the artists lived and, where relevant, where they died and are buried. It also draws from and points to suitable scholarly literature, making it an accessible introduction to students of the musical history of Paris. The book also describes another feature which, if it did not enrich, most certainly enlivened Parisian musical life: The full-scale musical riot. The most notorious of these took place at the Theatre des Champs Elysées in 1913 at the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps. Less physical, but no less vociferous, was the reception accorded to Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1860. Other composers who incurred the displeasure of Parisian audiences included Satie, Varese and Xenakis. These riots were not half-hearted affairs; police involvement was required and hospital casualty departments were kept busy. There are also chapters which discuss the musical history of the many theatres of Paris and the churches which played such an important part in the city’s musical past. The text is clear and accessible in order to appeal to both students and the general reader.
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 Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer 1791 1839 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Children in Opera written by Andrew Sutherland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a musicological investigation into operas that include children. Just over 100 works have been selected here for an in-depth discussion of the composer, the children, and the productions, and around 250 relevant works from around the world are also referenced. Four composers to have most significantly proliferated the medium are discussed in even greater detail: César Cui, Benjamin Britten, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Peter Maxwell Davies. Since opera began, it has been inextricably linked to society, by reflecting and shaping our culture through music and narrative, and, as a result, children have been involved. Despite the contribution they played, for several centuries, their importance was overlooked. By tracing the development of children’s participation in opera, this book uncovers the changing attitudes of composers towards them, and how this was reflected in the wider society. From the early productions of the seventeenth century, to those of the twenty-first century, the operatic children’s role has undergone a fundamental change. It almost seems that contemporary composers of operas view the inclusion of children in some way as ubiquitous. The rise of the children’s opera chorus and the explosion of children’s-only productions attest to the changing view of the value they can bring to the art. Some of the children to have characterised these roles are discussed in this book in order to redress the disproportionate lack of acknowledgement they often received for their performances.
Download or read book Anton Rubinstein written by Philip S. Taylor and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first modern biography in English of Russian composer-pianist Anton Rubinstein, this book places Rubinstein within the context of Russian and western European musical culture during the late 19th century, exploring his rise to international fame from humble origins in Bessarabia, as well as his subsequent rapid decline and marginalization in later musical culture. Taylor provides a balanced account of Rubinstein's life and his career as a piano virtuoso, conductor, composer, and as the founder of Russia's first conservatory. Widely considered the virtuosic heir to Liszt, and recognized internationally as an equivalent cultural icon, he performed with most leading musicians of the day, including Liszt himself, Joachim, Clara Schumann, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Saint-Saens, and Ysaÿe.
Download or read book Meyerbeer s Les Huguenots written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 29 February 1836, Les Huguenots, a grand opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), with words by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and Émile Deschamps (1791–1871), was performed for the first time, at the Paris Opéra. It was to be one of the most successful productions ever staged at the Opéra, with 1,126 performances in Paris over the next hundred years, and, in the process, breaking all box office records. It became Meyerbeer’s most popular work, with thousands of stagings throughout the world. Les Huguenots is a huge exploration of faith, tolerance, hatred, extermination, love, loyalty, self-sacrifice and hope in despair. It is the first panel in a central diptych on the Reformation, at 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 premiere of Robert le Diable, Meyerbeer worked on this gigantic drama, partly adapted by Scribe from Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique de Charles IX. Meyerbeer matches the text in drama, splendour and ceremony: it combines theatricalism with profound depths of feeling. Its gorgeous colouring, intense passion, consistency of dramatic treatment, and careful delineation of character secured for this work vast fame and influence. It was an epoch-making opera, an enduring monument to Meyerbeer’s fame. 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 24 August 1574. Meyerbeer’s music rises to the occasion, and reaches sublime heights of music drama, especially in the fourth and fifth acts, with the Blessing of the Daggers (one of the most electric 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. In spite of the overwhelming dramatic power and the instrumental riches of the score, the most significant aspect of the work came to be regarded as the supremacy of the seven principal vocal parts. Performances of Les Huguenots at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the 1890s were among the most famous in operatic history.
Download or read book The Operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: But these operas are far more than imitations: they show an apprehension of convention and genre that is nothing less than a dismantling of accepted formulas, and a highly original reconstruction of them."--Jacket.
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer was once one of the most famous of all opera composers, enjoying into the twentieth century the same universal admiration and performance as a composer like Puccini does today. Through a series of adverse factors, his reputation was seriously damaged with the resurgence of nationalism and the growing ant-Semitism in France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the propagation of a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic, the decline of the bel canto vocal tradition, and the disfavour manifested towards the heroism of French grand opera. All these factors, and especially the ban on his music in Nazi Germany, meant that Meyerbeer’s reputation was seriously overshadowed in the years after the Second World War. During the 1960s and 1970s, a tentative interest began to manifest itself, and with the advent of the new millennium, a growing rediscovery of his operas has been apparent. Not least in this process has been the recovery of all the composer’s private papers and their scholarly editing. His life and work have been the subject of a growing number of informed studies which have enabled radical reassessment. This volume takes a fresh look at this process of rediscovery by considering the composer in terms of the primary sources (diaries and letters) now available for forming a more complete and detailed biography unclouded by prejudicial or uninformed opinions. The extraordinary nature of Meyerbeer’s Jewish background and the role of this family in Prussian emancipation are also considered. Most importantly, however, his life and works are presented in a critical chronology that is fundamentally based on his own private papers, with testimony (both positive and negative) from many contemporary sources. A detailed iconography is integral to this process, and helps to bring Meyerbeer's story and music more vividly to life.
Download or read book The Years of Celebrity 1850 1856 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Verdi Opera Women written by Susan Rutherford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue : Verdi and his audience -- War -- Prayer -- Romance -- Sexuality -- Marriage -- Death -- Laughter.
