Download or read book French Opera Its Development to the Revolution written by Norman Demuth and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Staging the French Revolution written by Mark Darlow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment, both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and politics or ideology in this period and on the question of longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics. Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 moves these discussions boldly forward, focusing on the Paris Opéra (Académie Royale de Musique) in the cultural and political context of the early French Revolution. Both institutional history and cultural study, this is the first ever full-scale study of the Revolution and lyric theatre. The book concentrates on three aspects of how a royally-protected theatre negotiates the transition to national theatre: the external dimension, such as questions of ownership and governance and the institution's relationship with State institutions and popular assemblies; the internal management, finances, selection and preparation of works; and the cultural and aesthetic study of the works themselves and of their reception. In Staging the French Revolution, author Mark Darlow offers an unprecedented view of the material context of opera production, combining in-depth archival research with a study of the works themselves. He argues that a mixture of popular and State interventions created a repressive system in which cultural institutions retained agency, compelling individuals to follow and contribute to a shifting culture. Theatre thereby emerged as a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution's relation with the 'Old Regime', and is thus an essential key to the understanding of public opinion and publicity at this crucial historical moment. Combining recent approaches to institutions, sociability, and authors' rights with cultural studies of opera, Staging the French Revolution takes a historically grounded and methodologically innovative cross-disciplinary approach to opera and persuasively re-evaluates the long-standing, but rather sterile, concept of propaganda.
Download or read book Popular Opera in Eighteenth Century France written by David Charlton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book for a century to explore the development of French opera with spoken dialogue from its beginnings. Musical comedy in this form came in different styles and formed a distinct genre of opera, whose history has been obscured by neglect. Its songs were performed in private homes, where operas themselves were also given. The subject-matter was far wider in scope than is normally thought, with news stories and political themes finding their way onto the popular stage. In this book, David Charlton describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical' popular works.
Download or read book Backstage at the Revolution written by Victoria Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 14, 1789, a crowd of angry French citizens en route to the Bastille broke into the Paris Opera and helped themselves to any sturdy weapon they could find. Yet despite its long association with the royal court, its special privileges, and the splendor of its performances, the Opera itself was spared, even protected, by Revolutionary officials. Victoria Johnson’s Backstage at the Revolution tells the story of how this legendary opera house, despite being a lightning rod for charges of tyranny and waste, weathered the most dramatic political upheaval in European history. Sifting through royal edicts, private letters, and Revolutionary records of all kinds, Johnson uncovers the roots of the Opera’s survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established by the conditions of its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Johnson’s rich cultural history moves between both epochs, taking readers backstage to see how a motley crew of singers, dancers, royal ministers, poet entrepreneurs, shady managers, and the king of France all played a part in the creation and preservation of one of the world’s most fabled cultural institutions.
Download or read book Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France written by Olivia Bloechl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
Download or read book The Comedians of the King written by Julia Doe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-03-21 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.
Download or read book Opera a History of the Impossible Genre written by Jeffrey Langford and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera, a History of the Impossible Genre offers an accessible and chronological survey of opera. Beginning in the 16th century, each chapter hones its focus on a representative opera and composer, and provides discussion on historical and political context. With further reading lists, key term definitions, and composer biographies to support learning, this book covers the fundamental elements of the genre, including: subject matter, musical structure, aria and ensemble forms, singing styles, orchestra, and the structure of the libretto. The book will also help readers develop an appreciation of opera as a form of musical entertainment, which, despite seemingly insurmountable financial, philosophical, and artistic hurdles, has overcome the “impossible” to become one of the most popular and thrilling types of music heard on stage today. Opera, a History of the Impossible Genre is an approachable undergraduate textbook for students of opera and survey courses.
Download or read book Women Writing Opera written by Jacqueline Letzter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-08-12 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time it demonstrates how the Revolution fostered many dreams and ambitions for women that would be doomed to disappointment in the repressive post-Revolutionary era.".
Download or read book Theatre and State in France 1760 1905 written by Frederick William John Hemmings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-02-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relations between theatre and state were seldom more fraught in France than in this period. F. W. J. Hemmings traces the vicissitudes of this perennial conflict.
Download or read book Musical Debate and Political Culture in France 1700 1830 written by Robert James Arnold and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length treatment of the operatic querelles in eighteenth-century France, placing individual querelles in historical context and tracing common themes of authority, national prestige and the power of music over popular sentiment.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of France written by Gino Raymond and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the construction of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower to the Fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to NapolZon Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo to Albert Camus' L'Etranger and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, France has been a part of some of the greatest and most memorable events in human history. Author Gino Raymond relates the history of these events in the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of France. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on kings, politicians, authors, architects, composers, artists, and philosophers, a thorough history of France is presented.
Download or read book Science and Polity in France written by Charles Coulston Gillispie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-26 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Science and polity in France at the end of the Old Regime. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c1980.
Download or read book The Bals Publics at the Paris Op ra in the Eighteenth Century written by Richard Templar Semmens and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The range of possibilities for what was termed a ball in eighteenth-century France was quite considerable. At one extreme were the carefully regulated bals parés at the other were the elaborately staged bals masqués. Alternatively, a bal could also be an entirely impromptu affair. Throughout this colorful range of possibilities, the repertoire of dance styles and types was generally shared: danses figures, new as well as old, for couples; and group dances, among which the contredanse reigned supreme.There was another kind of ball, however, that has not yet been examined systematically by scholars. The bals publics held at the opera house in Paris were initiated not long after Louis XIV's death in 1715, and remained popular until the fall of the ancienne régime. This book explores the advent and early development of the bal public through 1763, when a fire destroyed the home of the Académie Royale de Musique (the 'Opera'). The bal public was unlike any other kind of ball, although, as with bals masqués, those in attendance were masked. This study aims, in part, to explore how the bal public might have influenced social dancing more generally. By 1744, there was a dramatic shift in social modeling from the royal balls at Versailles (and elsewhere) to the public balls at the Opera.
Download or read book History of the Opera written by Henry Sutherland Edwards and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theatre Under Louis XIV written by J. Prest and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-09-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the fascinating phenomenon of cross-casting and related gender issues in different theatrical genres and different performance contexts during the heyday of French theatre. Although professional acting troupes under Louis XIV were mixed, cross-casting remained an important feature of French court ballet (in which the King himself performed a number of women's roles) and an occasional feature of spoken comedy and tragic opera. Cross-casting also persisted out of necessity in the school drama of the period. This book fills an important gap in the history of French theatre and provides new insight into wider theoretical questions of gender and theatricality. The inclusion of chapters on ballet and opera (as well as spoken drama) opens up the richness of French theatre under Louis XIV in a way that has not been achieved before.
Download or read book Opera written by Guy A. Marco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-05-03 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.
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: Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.