Download or read book Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests written by David J. Buch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on hundreds of operas, singspiels, ballets, and plays with supernatural themes, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests argues that the tension between fantasy and Enlightenment-era rationality shaped some of the most important works of eighteenth-century musical theater and profoundly influenced how audiences and critics responded to them. David J. Buch reveals that despite—and perhaps even because of—their fundamental irrationality, fantastic and exotic themes acquired extraordinary force and popularity during the period, pervading theatrical works with music in the French, German, and Italian mainstream. Considering prominent compositions by Gluck, Rameau, and Haydn, as well as many seminal contributions by lesser-known artists, Buch locates the origins of these magical elements in such historical sources as ancient mythology, European fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and the occult. He concludes with a brilliant excavation of the supernatural roots of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, building a new foundation for our understanding of the magical themes that proliferated in Mozart’s wake.

Download or read book Music as Social and Cultural Practice written by Melania Bucciarelli and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The linking theme of the essays collected here is the intersection of musical work with social and cultural practice. Inspired by Professor Strohm's ideas, as is fitting in a volume in his honour, leading scholars in the field explore diverse conceptualizations of the 'work' within the contexts of a specific repertory, over four main sections. Music in Theory and Practice studies the link between treatises and musical practice, and analyses how historical writings can reveal period views on the 'work' in music before 1800. Art and Social Process: Music in Court and Urban Societies looks at the social and cultural practices informing composition from the late Renaissance until the mid-eighteenth century, and interrogates current notions of canon formation and the exchange between local and foreign traditions. Creating an Opera Industry focuses on how genre and artistic autonomy were defined in operas from diverse eras and countries, explaining the role of literature and politics in this process. Finally, The Crisis of Modernity treats nineteenth-century music, offering new models for 'work' and 'context' to challenge reigning theories of the meaning of these terms."--Publisher's website.

Download or read book The Baroque Libretto written by Domenico Pietropaolo and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Baroque Libretto catalogues the Baroque Italian operas and oratorios in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto and offers an analysis of how the study of libretto can inform the understanding of opera.

Download or read book Athenaeum written by and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Vivaldi written by Michael Talbot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1978, the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi's death, there has been an explosion of serious writing about his music, life and times. Much of this has taken the form of articles published in academic journals or conference proceedings, some of which are not easy to obtain. The twenty-two articles selected by Michael Talbot for this volume form a representative selection of the best writing on Vivaldi from the last 30 years, featuring such major figures in Vivaldi research as Reinhard Strohm, Paul Everett, Gastone Vio and Federico Maria Sardelli. Aspects covered include biography, Venetian cultural history, manuscript studies, genre studies and musical analysis. The intention is to serve as a 'first port of call' for those wishing to learn more about Vivaldi or to refresh their existing knowledge. An introduction by Michael Talbot reviews the state of Vivaldi scholarship past and present and comments on the significance of the articles.

Download or read book Vivaldi written by H. C. Robbins Landon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-08-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon rediscovers the composer through an accessible and musically informed biography. Presenting documentation about Vivaldi discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s, Robbins Landon explores a fascinating life: Vivaldi was a Catholic priest who gave up celebrating Mass almost as soon as he was ordained; we was a lifelong invalid, but could travel all over Europe when it suited him; he was a dazzling violin virtuoso but died a pauper. Robbins Landon masterfully integrates musical analysis and biography, using each to illuminate the other and to unravel the riddle of Vivaldi's identity and extraordinary gift. This book includes illustrations of eighteenth-century Venice and several newly translated letters.

Download or read book Antonio Vivaldi written by Karl Heller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-03-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Vivaldi's rediscovery after World War II quickly led him from obscurity to his present renown as one of the most popular 18th-century composers. Heller's biography presents the important facets of his life, his works, and his influence on music history.

Download or read book Essays on Handel and Italian Opera written by Reinhard Strohm and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition.

Download or read book Jan ek and Czech Music written by Michael Brim Beckerman and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first week of May 1988, more than seventy scholars and musicians from five countries gathered at Washington University in St. Louis to participate in the first conference and festival ever to take place in the United States on the Moravian composer Leos Janácek. This volume, arranged in seven parts, is a collection of thirty-five of the papers presented at the conference. It is the first large collection of essays in English concerning Janácek's music, and the only collection of proceedings from a Janácek symposium to be published in the last twenty-five years... most of its essays deal with Janácek's music, while some with other Czech music, mostly from before the time of Bedrich Smetana. This breadth of scope is not a weakness of either the conference or the volume, since it places Janácek in historical perspective, and since the articles that deal with the earlier music are among the best in the volume and are deserving of a forum. John K. Novak, Notes June 1996

Download or read book A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres 1660 1760 written by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.

Download or read book The Vivaldi Compendium written by Michael Talbot and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vivaldi Compendium represents the latest in Vivaldi research, drawing on the author's close involvement with Vivaldi and Venetian music over four decades.

Download or read book Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart written by Ralph P. Locke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph P. Locke provides fresh insights into Western culture's increasing awareness of ethnic Otherness during the years 1500-1800.

Download or read book The Business of Music written by Michael Talbot and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is business, for music, a regrettable necessity or a spur to creativity? Are there limits to the influence that economic factors can or should exert on the musical imagination and its product? In the eleven essays contained in this book the authors wrestle with these questions from the perspective of their chosen area of research. The range is wide: from 1700 to the present day; from the opera house to the community centre; from composers, performers and pedagogues to managers, publishers and lawyers; from piano miniatures to folk music and pop CDs. If there is a consensus, it is that music serves its own interests best when it harnesses business rather than denying it.

Download or read book The Liberation of Jerusalem written by Torquato Tasso and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-12 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The bitter tragedy of human life— horrors of death, attack, retreat, advance, and the great game of Destiny and Chance. ' In The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581), Torquato Tasso set out to write an epic to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unlike his predecessors, he took his subject not from myth but from history: the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The siege of the city is played out alongside a magical romance of love and sacrifice, in which the Christian knight Rinaldo succumbs to the charms of the pagan sorceress Armida, and the warrior maiden Clorinda inspires a fatal passion in the Christian Tancred. Tasso's masterpiece left its mark on writers from Spenser and Milton to Goethe and Byron, and inspired countless painters and composers. This is the first English translation in modern times that faithfully reflects both the sense and the verse form of the original. Max Wickert's fine rendering is introduced by Mark Davie, who places Tasso's poem in the context of his life and times and points to the qualities that have ensured its lasting impact on Western culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Download or read book Dictionary catalogue of Operas and Operettas which Have Been Performed on the Public Stage written by John Towers and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 1056 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Vivaldi Motezuma and the Opera Seria written by Michael Talbot and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great was the interest among Vivaldians and opera-lovers when a score of a large portion of Vivaldi's lost opera Motezuma (1733) was unexpectedly discovered among manuscripts from the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin returned to Berlin from Kiev in 2000. The find was providential, since in recent decades practically all of Vivaldi's performable operatic music has been presented to the public. The newly discovered work has thus given a much-needed fillip to everyone concerned with Vivaldi's operas. Scholarly discussion was initiated in an international symposium held at the De Doelen concert hall in Rotterdam in June 2005 alongside the work's first modern performance. From the start, it was planned that the papers read at the symposium, augmented by essays commissioned from other scholars, would be gathered into a book centring on Motezuma. The starting point for the contributions, all of which appear in English, is Steffen Voss's 'Vivaldi's Music for the Opera Motezuma, RV 723'. This focuses on the opera itself: its origins, transmission, dramaturgy and music. Reinhard Strohm follows with 'Vivaldi and His Operas, 1730-1734: A Critical Survey': a chronicle of Vivaldi's operatic activities during the creative period surrounding Motezuma. Strohm's essay enables one to identify more clearly what is typical - for Vivaldi and for its period - in Motezuma, and what is less typical. Micky White and Michael Talbot then offer a sidelight on Venetian opera from the same period by charting the chequered career of a nephew of Vivaldi in 'Pietro Mauro, detto 'il Vivaldi': Failed Tenor, Failed Impresario, Failed Husband, Acclaimed Copyist'. Briefly, during the late 1730s, Mauro's career in opera mirrored Vivaldi's own at a humbler level, and a scandal in which the former became embroiled may even have had repercussions for his uncle. We move next to the world of librettos and dramaturgy. The 'American' dimension of the opera is explored in Jurgen Maehder's 'Alvise Giusti's Libretto Motezuma and the Conquest of Mexico in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Seria'. To choose an American subject for an opera seria was a novelty at the time, and the libretto for Motezuma casts an interesting light on contemporary attitudes towards the Conquista and towards the indigenous civilizations that it brought to a brutal end. Carlo Vitali's essay 'A Case of Historical Revisionism in the Theatre: Some Undeclared Sources for Vivaldi's Motezuma' probes more deeply into the libretto's historical antecedents. Melania Bucciarelli, in 'Taming the exotic: Vivaldi's Armida al campo d'Egitto', explores the treatment of an Ottoman theme in a Vivaldi opera of the period leading up to Motezuma. In a sense, the Ottoman empire formed a prototype of 'alterity' on which later operatic depictions of non-European peoples could draw, while also supplying a test-bed for the treatment of topical subjects during a tense period of intermittent warfare with the Sublime Porte. The next two contributions redirect the focus towards the music of Motezuma. Kurt Markstrom, in 'The Vivaldi-Vinci Interconnections, 1724-26 and beyond: Implications for the Late Style of Vivaldi', considers the interaction in the operatic arena between Vivaldi and his brilliant contemporary Leonardo Vinci, who briefly burst on to the Venetian scene in the 1720s before his premature death in 1730 robbed the all-conquering Neapolitan style of one of its heroes. Markstrom shows how Vivaldi was both influenced by, and an influence on, Vinci. Michael Talbot's essay 'Vivaldi's 'Late' Style: Final Fruition or Terminal Decline?' ponders whether there is any objective basis in positing a 'late' style in Vivaldi's case and, if so, where its boundaries lie. His conclusion is that there is indeed a late style, beginning in the second half of the 1720s and divisible into two sub-periods, with Motezuma close to the end of the first. 'Final fruition' is an apt description of the first sub-period, 'terminal decline' (with qualifications) of the second. Fittingly, the concluding essay, Frederic Delamea's 'Vivaldi in scena: Thoughts on The Revival of Vivaldi's Operas', confronts the world of present-day staged performance. Why, this author asks, do we commonly pay such respect to notions of historical fidelity in the musical realization of the operas, while we trample so brutally on authenticity in the matter of stagecraft and production. This essay promises to become a seminal text for an ongoing debate.

Download or read book Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy written by Michael Talbot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As shown by the ever-increasing volume of recordings, editions and performances of the vast repertory of secular cantatas for solo voice produced, primarily in Italy, in the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, this long neglected genre has at last 'come of age'. However, scholarly interest is currently lagging behind musical practice: incredibly, there has been no general study of the Baroque cantata since Eugen Schmitz's handbook of 1914, and although many academic theses have examined microscopically the cantatas of individual composers, there has been little opportunity to view these against the broader canvas of the genre as a whole. The contributors in this volume choose aspects of the cantata relevant to their special interests in order to say new things about the works, whether historical, analytical, bibliographical, discographical or performance-based. The prime focus is on Italian-born composers working between 1650 and 1750 (thus not Handel), but the opportunity is also taken in one chapter (by Graham Sadler) to compare the French cantata tradition with its Italian parent in association with a startling new claim regarding the intended instrumentation. Many key figures are considered, among them Tomaso Albinoni, Giovanni Bononcini, Giovanni Legrenzi, Benedetto Marcello, Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella, Leonardo Vinci and Antonio Vivaldi. The poetic texts of the cantatas, all too often treated as being of little intrinsic interest, are given their due weight. Space is also found for discussions of the history of Baroque solo cantatas on disc and of the realization of the continuo in cantata arias - a topic more complex and contentious than may at first be apparent. The book aims to stimulate interest in, and to win converts to, this genre, which in its day equalled the instrumental sonata in importance, and in which more than a few composers invested a major part of their creativity.