Download or read book The Prussian Years and Le Proph te 1840 1849 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer The Prussian years and Le Proph te 1840 1849 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer 1840 1849 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 1999 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 2 covers the 1840s, a period designated as the Prussian Years. From 1846 Meyerbeer's journal becomes a consistent daily record, resulting in one of the most sustained depictions of a contemporary artistic, theatrical, and musical milieu ever kept by a famous composer. Illustrated.
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 s Le Proph te written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a period of close to half a century, French grand opéra, as exemplified by the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer and his school, was the preferred form of music for the theatre in most of the civilized world. During the July Monarchy, French grand operas, with their plots drawn from historical events, tended to be received as metaphors for current political themes. Meyerbee’s Le Prophète illustrates the complex, contested nature of political meaning during this period. This opera was set in the context of the emerging liberal historiography pioneered by Jules Michelet, and reactions to it illustrate the manner in which audiences and critics constructed ‘meanings’ with reference to their personal and collective experience and memories, with grand opera occupying a central role at that time. Le Prophète was once one of the most famous of operas, performed over 500 times at the Paris Opéra, and given throughout the civilized world, in the days when opera was ever-present in society. The plot has been called absurd, based as it is on the history of the Anabaptists in Münster (1534-35). However, history is far stranger than fiction, and Eugene Scribe’s libretto provides a modification of the garish facts in the interests of a highly symbolic scenario based on a tragic Reformation episode, and exploring the implication of the role of religion, power and politics in the fate of humanity. The music is powerful, gripping, and torrential in its flow. Each act is beautifully structured, each set piece crafted to perfection, dominated by an overwhelming sound world of instrumental colours and disturbing harmony. The ballet plays a vital function as a countersign to the human deeds of darkness and despair that characterize the action. The Coronation Scene is fascinating, and overwhelming in its impact, one of opera’s greatest moments. This study examines the origins and creation of the opera, its dramaturgy and musical style, the history of its astonishing reception around the world until the 1930s. One of the special features of this book is the collection of iconography associated with the work and its interpretation by many of the greatest singers of the Golden Age of opera.
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 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 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 Society Culture and Opera in Florence 1814 1830 written by Aubrey S. Garlington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, an event that signalled an end to nearly fourteen years of French domination, Florence seemed to enter a new cultural 'golden age' and by 1824 was described as 'an Earthly Paradise' by the political and liberal writer, Pietro Giordano. Politically, economically and culturally, the city prospered in this new era. After 1814 it seemed as if the Enlightenment had found a new beginning in Florence. Aubrey Garlington, a scholar of long standing in the music of early nineteenth-century Florence, considers the roles played by John Fane, Lord Burghersh, an English aristocrat, diplomat and dilettante composer together with his wife, Priscilla, in the development of the richly homogeneous culture that blossomed in Florence at this time. Burghersh, known today for being instrumental in the founding of the English Royal Academy of Music, composed six operas that were performed privately on numerous occasions at the English Embassy, his best known work being "La Fedra". Lady Burghersh became known for her painting and dilettante theatrical performances. Garlington provides a thorough re-examination of the categories 'professional' and 'dilettante' which were so important in the concept of music at this time. The notions of boundaries between public and private activity are discussed, and the operas themselves are examined specifically. Through the contemplation of the Burghershs's sixteen year stay in Florence, the significance of dilettante orientations are demonstrated to have been essential components for the city's musical and social life. Garlington draws together an impressive compilation of documentation regarding the part music played in shaping society and culture. In this way, the book will appeal not only to opera historians, musicologists and critics working on the nineteenth century, but also to historians and scholars of cultural theory.
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 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 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 Last Years 1857 1864 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bibliographic Guide to Music written by New York Public Library. Music Division and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Choice written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
