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 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 Meyerbeer s Robert le Diable written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert le Diable by Giacomo Meyerbeer is regarded as a musical milestone, a definitive statement in the 19th-century development of French grand opéra from the tragédie lyrique of Lully, Rameau, Gluck and Spontini. The libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne was derived from the medieval legend of “Robert the Devil”. First performed on 21 November 1831 at the Paris Opéra, the work brought Meyerbeer international celebrity. Robert le Diable remains a legend in the annals of opera. The fascinating story reveals a complex imagery and symbolism that touches on the deepest intuitions of human experience and personal development, and exercises an archetypal unconscious appeal akin to the nature of fairy tales. The musical language, richly melodic and theatrically powerful, looks back to Rossini and the traditions of bel canto, and yet forges a new formal pliancy and dramatic urgency. The harmony and orchestration, the melodramatic plot, and overwhelming stage effects (especially the famous act 3 Ballet of the Nuns, a touchstone of dark Romanticism) confirmed Meyerbeer as the leading opera composer of his age. His style fuses German counterpoint, Italian melody, French grandeur, and unprecedented orchestral riches in a unique and overwhelming artistic blend. Robert became one of the greatest successes in the history of opera. In the first two years of its history it was given in 69 different theatres, and was performed 754 times at the Paris Opéra until 1893. This huge success was reflected in more than 160 transcriptions, arrangements, paraphrases and fantasias for the orchestra, military band, dance band, piano and other solo instruments written between 1832 and 1955. After many years of neglect, there is a resurgence of interest in this work with its fascinating appeal. This book is devoted to the story of this exceptional opera. It traces the origins, the première, the performance history, and also considers the special characteristics of both the libretto and the music. One of the most intriguing aspects of Robert le Diable was the nature of the iconography generated by its most famous scenes. Artists and illustrators responded in many different ways to the Gambling Scene, the Scene at the Cross, the Cloister Scene for the legendary Ballet of the Nuns, and the great trio in act 5. All of these are examined in terms of the the many different pictorial and plastic responses they inspired over some 60 years.
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 Fromental Hal vy and His Operas 1799 1841 written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his lifetime, the opera composer Fromental Halévy was considered the leader of the French school; his admirers included Wagner, Berlioz, and later Mahler. Today, he is chiefly remembered for his grand tragic opera La Juive (Paris, 1835), a unique work exploring the nature of freedom, faith, and tolerance. It has enjoyed rediscovery in recent times, and its perennial challenge to our presuppositions makes it a work of intense artistic significance. Halevy worked in the heady context of Paris after the 1830 Revolution and before the debacle of 1870—when the French capital was at the centre of the operatic world. He wrote some 30 operas in the established genres of grand opéra and opéra-comique. L’Éclair (1835) and Guido et Ginévra (1838) consolidated his success in these genres. This study throws light on this shadowy figure, looking at his life, his letters, contemporary opinion about him, and, most importantly, his operas. Each one is examined in terms of its origin, libretto, musical features, and place in the vibrant critical journalism of mid-19th century France. The text provides musical examples and something of the rich iconography that accompanied the creation of his works.
Download or read book Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective written by Axel Körner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music written by John Michael Cooper and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library Journal praises the book as "an excellent one-volume ready reference resource for students, researchers, and others interested in music history." Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition covers the persons, ideas, practices, and works that made up the worlds of Western music during the long 19th century (ca. 1780–1918). It’s the first book to recognize that Romantic music was very nearly a global phenomenon. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more exponents of musical Romanticism from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music—thus challenging the conventional hegemony of musical Romanticisms by men and by Western European nations. This book includes entries on topics including anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject. It includes Romantic musicians who were not primarily composers, as well as topics such as the Haitian Revolution, spirituals, and ragtime that were more important for music in the long 19th century than is generally acknowledged. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of Romantic music than is elsewhere available. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and a dictionary section with more than 600 cross-referenced entries on traditions, famous pieces, persons, places, technical terms, and institutions of Romantic music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic music.
Download or read book The Complete Idiot s Guide Music Dictionary written by Stanford Felix and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-07-06 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A musician's vocabulary needs more than Do, Re, Mi... Written in clear, concise, easy-to-understand language, The Complete Idiot's Guide® Music Dictionary covers a multitude of musical aspects indispensable to any musician. Author and music professor Stanford Felix has compiled the most commonly found terms and explains them in a way that even the most novice musician can comprehend. • The only dictionary geared toward the beginner musician • Gives clear, concise definitions of terms, theories, and instruments, as well as important works, musicians, and composers
Download or read book Carmen Abroad written by Richard Langham Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transnational history of the performance, reception, translation, adaptation and appropriation of Bizet's Carmen from 1875 to 1945. This volume explores how Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe, and how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse contexts.
Download or read book American Record Guide written by and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Meyerbeer s Opera L Africaine written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Opera History and Guide written by and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book All Music Guide to Classical Music written by Chris Woodstra and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.
Download or read book Verdi in Victorian London written by Massimo Zicari and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a byword for beauty, Verdi’s operas were far from universally acclaimed when they reached London in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why did some critics react so harshly? Who were they and what biases and prejudices animated them? When did their antagonistic attitude change? And why did opera managers continue to produce Verdi’s operas, in spite of their alleged worthlessness? Massimo Zicari’s Verdi in Victorian London reconstructs the reception of Verdi’s operas in London from 1844, when a first critical account was published in the pages of The Athenaeum, to 1901, when Verdi’s death received extensive tribute in The Musical Times. In the 1840s, certain London journalists were positively hostile towards the most talked-about representative of Italian opera, only to change their tune in the years to come. The supercilious critic of The Athenaeum, Henry Fothergill Chorley, declared that Verdi’s melodies were worn, hackneyed and meaningless, his harmonies and progressions crude, his orchestration noisy. The scribes of The Times, The Musical World, The Illustrated London News, and The Musical Times all contributed to the critical hubbub. Yet by the 1850s, Victorian critics, however grudging, could neither deny nor ignore the popularity of Verdi’s operas. Over the final three decades of the nineteenth century, moreover, London’s musical milieu underwent changes of great magnitude, shifting the manner in which Verdi was conceptualized and making room for the powerful influence of Wagner. Nostalgic commentators began to lament the sad state of the Land of Song, referring to the now departed "palmy days of Italian opera." Zicari charts this entire cultural constellation. Verdi in Victorian London is required reading for both academics and opera aficionados. Music specialists will value a historical reconstruction that stems from a large body of first-hand source material, while Verdi lovers and Italian opera addicts will enjoy vivid analysis free from technical jargon. For students, scholars and plain readers alike, this book is an illuminating addition to the study of music reception.
Download or read book L Africaine opera in five acts etc Translated from the French written by Eugène Scribe and published by . This book was released on 1871 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cumulative Book Index written by and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 858 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
