Download or read book The Politics of Opera in Handel s Britain written by Thomas McGeary and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas McGeary's book explores the relationship between Italian opera and British partisan politics in the era of George Frideric Handel.
Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Opera 1720 1742 written by Thomas McGeary and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the intersection of the world of opera, literature and partisan politics to show how Italian opera was put to use in the 'culture wars' of the day. This last of a trilogy of books on opera and politics in Britain examines the cultural politics of opera during the ministerial reign of Sir Robert Walpole from 1720 to 1742. The book explores the intersection of the world of opera, literature, and partisan politics to show how Italian opera - with its associations with the court, ministry and Britain's social-political elite - was put to use in the 'culture wars' of the day: how Italian opera was used for partisan political advantage; how political work could be accomplished by means of opera. It shows that attacks on opera had ulterior targets. The book surveys a range of often overlooked verse and prints to show how critique or satire of opera were a means for oppositional writers to delegitimize the Walpole ministry. Polemicists framed opera as a consequence of the corruption, luxury and False Taste generated by Walpole's ministry. It closes in the watershed year 1742: Handel had produced the last of his Italian operas the previous year, Walpole fell from power, and Alexander Pope published the last book of his Dunciad project.
Download or read book Opera passion power and politics written by Kate Bailey and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opera is traditionally regarded as an elitist art form far removed from reality by its fantastical pots and melodramatic divas. This book shows that beneath the opulent sets and sumptuous costumes, opera is very much a product of its time. Like all the great narrative arts, it draws on essential human experiences to create a form that can be endlessly reinvented to reflect a changing society.Focusing on seven opera premieres in seven distinct cultural landscapes, with additional essays by contemporary practitioners including Placido Domingo, Antonio Pappano and Simone Young, the book culminates in the international explosion of opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The seven operas and premieres are: Venice (Monteverdi's L'Incoranazione di Poppea, 1642); London (Handel's Rinaldo, 1711); Vienna (Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, 1786); Milan (Verdi's Nabucco, 1842); Paris (Wagner's Tannhauser, 1861); Dresden (Strauss' Salome, 1905) and St Petersburg 0(Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 1934)" -- publisher's description.
Download or read book Opera and Politics in Queen Anne s Britain 1705 1714 written by Thomas McGeary and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.
Download or read book Handel s Oratorios and Eighteenth Century Thought written by Ruth Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-04 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-r anging and challenging book, Ruth Smith claims that the words to Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realised. She explores eighteenth-century literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for the thought and sensibility of their time. The book thus enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the close relationship between music and its intellectual contexts.
Download or read book Political Aesthetics written by Karl Axelsson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a gateway to a new history of modern aesthetics, this book challenges conventional views of how art's significance developed in society. The 18th century is often said to have involved a radical transformation in the concept of art: from the understanding that it has a practical purpose to the modern belief that it is intrinsically valuable. By exploring the ground between these notions of art's function, Karl Axelsson reveals how scholars of culture made taste, morals and a politically stable society integral to their claims about the experience of nature and art. Focusing on writings by two of the most prolific men of letters in the 18th century, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Axelsson contests the conviction that modern aesthetic autonomy reoriented the criticism and philosophy originally prompted by these two key figures in the history of aesthetics. By re-examining the political relevance of Addison and Shaftesbury's theories of taste, Axelsson shows that first and foremost they sought to fortify a natural link between aesthetic experience and modern political society.
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 2023-03-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts written by David Punter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic is a contested and complicated phenomenon, extending over many centuries and across all the arts. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the range of essays run from medieval architecture and design to contemporary gaming and internet fiction; from classical painting to the modern novel; from ballet and dance to contemporary Goth music. The contributors include many of the best-known critics of the Gothic (e.g., Hogle, Punter, Spooner, Bruhm) as well as newer names such as Kirk and Round. The editor has put all these contributors in touch with each other in the preparation of their essays in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the reader by producing a well-integrated book which will prove much more than a collection of disparate essays, but rather a distinctive contribution to a field.
Download or read book Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth Century Britain written by Matthew Gardner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals how the musical benefit allowed musicians, composers, and audiences to engage in new professional, financial, and artistic contexts.
Download or read book Pasticcio opera in Britain written by Peter Morgan Barnes and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera. This radical way of creating opera formed a counterweight, even a relief, to the trenchant masculinity of literate culture in the seventeenth century. It undermined the narrowing of nationalism in the eighteenth century, and was an act of gross sacrilege against the cult of Romantic genius in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it found itself on the wrong side of copyright law. However, in the twenty-first century it is enjoying a tentative revival. This book redefines pasticcio as a method rather than a genre of opera and aligns it with other art forms which also created their works from pre-existing parts, including sculpture. A pasticcio opera is created from pre-existing music and text, thus flying in face of insistence on originality and creation by a solo genius.
Download or read book The Power of Pastiche written by Alison DeSimone and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Chapters offer analyses of concert programming, early music criticism, the compilation of pasticcio operas and songbook miscellanies, and even the ways in which composers and performers shaped their freelancing careers. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.
Download or read book Killing Hercules written by Richard Rowland and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?
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: During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
Download or read book A History of Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.
Download or read book The Scots Magazine Or General Repository of Literature History and Politics written by and published by . This book was released on 1800 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Histories of Violence written by Brad Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Download or read book The Saturday Review of Politics Literature Science and Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
