Download or read book Dance in Handel s London Operas written by Sarah Yuill McCleave and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas, including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Sallé" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.
Download or read book The Lives of George Frideric Handel written by David Hunter and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories moulded our understanding of the musician, the man and the icon?
Download or read book A Poetics of Handel s Operas written by Nathan Link and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Poetics of Handel's Operas investigates the rich representational fabric of Handel's stories, drawing upon musicology, narratology, drama, and film in offering a study with appeal to scholars, producers and performers, opera afficionados, and anyone fascinated by storytelling. In most storytelling genres, we often distinguish between the story, on the one hand, and the way that story is represented, on the other, without a second thought. We know that a character in a film hears neither her own voice-over nor the ambient music that accompanies it, and that she does not really build a house from the ground up in the three minutes spanned by the cinematic montage that depict its construction. In opera, however, many commentators to this day characterize the medium as "unrealistic," since we know, for example, that people in the real world do not sing to each other, nor does orchestral music accompany their utterances. This said, the vocal and orchestral music, while not literally present in the world of the story surely have a great deal to tell us about the opera's story and its characters, and if we distinguish the performance we see and hear on the stage and in the orchestra pit from the story represented, we enable ourselves to construct stories that are no less coherent than those conveyed by other media. By avoiding conflation of the story and its representation, we enable ourselves to engage more meaningfully with the significance of these and many other unique aspects of operatic storytelling"--
Download or read book Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera written by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Académie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.
Download or read book Women s Work written by Lynn Brooks and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the history of women, dance has been difficult to capture as a historical subject. Yet in bringing together these two areas of study, the nine internationally renowned scholars in this volume shed new and surprising light on women’s roles as performers of dance, choreographers, shapers of aesthetic trends, and patrons of dance in Italy, France, England, and Germany before 1800. Through dance, women asserted power in spheres largely dominated by men: the court, the theater, and the church. As women’s dance worlds intersected with men’s, their lives and visions were supported or opposed, creating a complex politics of creative, spiritual, and political expression. From a women’s religious order in the thirteenth-century Low Countries that used dance as a spiritual rite of passage to the salon culture of eighteenth-century France where dance became an integral part of women’s cultural influence, the writers in this volume explore the meaning of these women’s stories, performances, and dancing bodies, demonstrating that dance is truly a field across which women have moved with finesse and power for many centuries past.
Download or read book Operatic Pasticcios in 18th Century Europe written by Berthold Over and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as »pasticcios« since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book G F Handel written by Mary Ann Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baroque composer George Frideric Handel easily ranks among the world's greatest composers. The first edition of this research guide on Handel appeared in 1988; since that time a great deal of scholarly work has been published on Handel and related areas, including the discovery of a hitherto unknown work. New general resources such as the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), electronic resources such as the RISM libretto catalogue online, and the study of Handel's continuing popularity as evidenced by the new Handel House Museum in London and Handel practice around the world (e.g., Messiah and millennium celebrations in Tonga, singalong Messiahs etc.) are incorporated into this revised edition of the Handel guide.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Handel written by Donald Burrows and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to one of the principal creative figures in Baroque music.
Download or read book George Frideric Handel A Life with Friends written by Ellen T. Harris and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself—known to most as the composer of Messiah—is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives. One document—Handel’s will—offers us a narrow window into his personal life. In it, he remembers not only family and close colleagues but also neighborhood friends. In search of the private man behind the public figure, Ellen T. Harris has spent years tracking down the letters, diaries, personal accounts, legal cases, and other documents connected to these bequests. The result is a tightly woven tapestry of London in the first half of the eighteenth century, one that interlaces vibrant descriptions of Handel’s music with stories of loyalty, cunning, and betrayal. With this wholly new approach, Harris has achieved something greater than biography. Layering the interconnecting stories of Handel’s friends like the subjects and countersubjects of a fugue, Harris introduces us to an ambitious, shrewd, generous, brilliant, and flawed man, hiding in full view behind his public persona.
Download or read book Musical America written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Handel written by David Vickers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology represents scholarly literature devoted to Handel over the last few decades, and contains different kinds of studies of the composer's biography, operatic career, singers, librettists, and his relationship with the music of other composers. Case studies range from recent research that transforms our knowledge of large-scale English works to an interdisciplinary exploration of an individual opera aria. Designed to bring easy and convenient access to students, performers and music lovers, the wide-ranging articles are selected by David Vickers (co-editor of the recent Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia) from diverse sources - not only familiar important journals, but also specialist yearbooks, festschrifts, not easily accessible newsletters, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues. Many of these represent an up-to-date understanding of modern Handel studies, deal with fascinating biographical issues (such as the composer's art collection, his chronic health problems, and the nature of popular anecdotal evidence), and fill gaps in the mainstream Handelian literature.
Download or read book The Stage s Glory written by Berta Joncus and published by University of Delaware. This book was released on 2011-05-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich's multifaceted career. Contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines-Dtheatre, dance, music, art, and cultural historyDprovide detailed analyses of Rich's productions and representations.
Download or read book Singing in Signs written by Gregory J. Decker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera offers a bold and refreshing assessment of the state of opera study as seen through the lens of semiotics. At its core, the volume responds to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker's Analyzing Opera, utilizing a semiotic framework to embrace opera on its own terms and engage all of its constituent elements in interpretation. Chapters in this collection resurrect the larger sense of serious operatic study as a multi-faceted, interpretive discipline, no longer in isolation. Contributors pay particular attention to the musical, dramatic, cultural, and performative in opera and how these modes can create an intertext that informs interpretation. Combining traditional and emerging methodologies, Singing in Signs engages composer-constructed and work-specific music-semiotic systems, broader socio-cultural music codes, and narrative strategies, with implications for performance and staging practices today.
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 Performing Arts in Changing Societies written by Randi Margrete Selvik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Arts in Changing Societies is a detailed exploration of genre development within the fields of dance, theatre, and opera in selected European countries during the decades before and after 1800. An introductory chapter outlines the theoretical and ideological background of genre thinking in Europe, starting from antiquity. A further fourteen chapters cover the performing genres as they developed in England, France, Germany, and Austria, and follow the dissemination and adaptation of the corresponding genres in minor and major cities in the Nordic countries. With a strong emphasis on the role that pragmatic and contextual factors had in defining genres, the book examines such subjects as the dancing masters in Christiania (Oslo), circa 1800, the repertory and travels of an itinerant acrobat and his wife in Norway in the 1760s, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas on bourgeois drama in Denmark. Including detailed analyses in the light of material, political, and social factors, this is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of musicology, opera studies, and theatre and performance studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Opera written by Anthony R. DelDonna and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.
