Opera

Opera
Author: Guy A. Marco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 655
Release: 2002-05-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113557801X

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.

Diplomacy and the Aristocracy as Patrons of Music and Theatre in the Europe of the Ancien Régime

Diplomacy and the Aristocracy as Patrons of Music and Theatre in the Europe of the Ancien Régime
Author: Iskrena Yordanova
Publisher: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
Total Pages: 901
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3990127705

This volume explores the dense networks created by diplomatic relationships between European courts and aristocratic households in the early modern age, with the emphasis on celebratory events and the circulation of theatrical plots and practitioners promoted by political and diplomatic connections. The offices of plenipotentiary ministers were often outposts providing useful information about cultural life in foreign countries. Sometimes the artistic strategies defined through the exchanges of couriers were destined to leave a legacy in the history of arts, especially of music and theatre. Ministers favored or promoted careers, described or made pieces of repertoire available to new audiences, and even supported practitioners in their difficult travels by planning profitable tours. They stood behind extraordinary artists and protected many stage performers with their authority, while carefully observing and transmitting precious information about the cultural and musical life of the countries where they resided.

Theatre of Sexual Attraction and Psychological Destruction

Theatre of Sexual Attraction and Psychological Destruction
Author: Karl A.E. Enenkel
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2024-11-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 900469465X

The book examines the myth of Hercules and Omphale/Iole which became an important topic in the visual arts, 1500–1800. It offers an analysis of the iconography from the perspective of the history of emotions, classical and Neo-Latin philology, reception and gender studies. The early modern inventions of the myth excel in a skilful display of mixed and compound emotions, such as the male character's psychopathology, and of the theatrical performance of emotions by the female character.

The Cambridge Companion to Handel

The Cambridge Companion to Handel
Author: Donald Burrows
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1997-12-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1139825216

Handel is recognised as one of the principal creative figures in Baroque music. In this Companion acknowledged experts on Handel make their expertise accessible to the interested general reader and music lover. All the genres in which Handel composed are considered including oratorio, chamber cantata, opera, and church music, as well as works for the keyboard and orchestra. The wide-ranging, specially-commissioned essays cover topics from Handel's composing methods to his treatment of the Italian language and matters of performance practice. The background to Handel's musical career is a major theme of the volume. The opening chapters deal with his musical education in Germany and the circumstances in Italy during his time there. Most of Handel's career was based in London and important topics here include contemporary concert life and theatre management, the British and Italian musicians among whom he worked, and the librettists for the English oratorios.

Mirrors of Heaven or Worldly Theaters?

Mirrors of Heaven or Worldly Theaters?
Author: Jonathan E. Glixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019069534X

Mirrors of Heaven or Worldly Theaters? Venetian Nunneries and Their Music explores the dynamic role of music performance and patronage in the convents of Venice and its lagoon from the sixteenth century to the fall of Venice around 1800. Examining sacred music performed by the nuns themselves and by professional musicians they employed, author Jonathan E. Glixon considers the nuns as collective patrons, of both musical performances by professionals in their external churches-primarily for the annual feast of the patron saint, a notable attraction for both Venetians and foreign visitors-and of musical instruments, namely organs and bells. The book explores the rituals and accompanying music for the transitions in a nun's life, most importantly the ceremonies through which she moved from the outside world to the cloister, as well as liturgical music within the cloister, performed by the nuns themselves, from chant to simple polyphony, and the rare occasions where more elaborate music can be documented. Also considered are the teaching of music to both nuns and girls resident in convents as boarding students, and entertainment-musical and theatrical-by and for the nuns. Mirrors of Heaven, the first large-scale study of its kind, contains richly detailed appendices featuring a calendar of musical events at Venetian nunneries, details on nunnery organs, lists of teachers, and inventories of musical and ceremonial books, both manuscript and printed. A companion website supplements the book's musical examples with editions of complete musical works, which are brought to life with accompanying audio files.

Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe

Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe
Author: Berthold Over
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 799
Release: 2021-04-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3839448859

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.

Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, C.1700

Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, C.1700
Author: Don Fader
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783276282

This study stems from discoveries in a trove of documents belonging to Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de Vaudâemont, who served as governor of Milan under the Spanish crown from 1698 to 1706. These documents, together with a mass of other sources - letters, diaries, treatises, libretti, scores - offer a vivid new picture of musical life in Paris and Milan as well as exchanges between France and Italy. The book is both a patronage study and an examination of the contributions by - and the difficulties facing - musicians and dancers who worked across national and cultural boundaries. Music, Dance, and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, c.1700 follows the careers of the prince and the French violinist and composer Michel Pignolet de Montâeclair. In the context of a renewed fascination with Italian music in the 1690s, Montâeclair made a name for himself in Paris as a pedagogue and composer who understood both national styles and blended them in a way that was successful on French terms. Vaudâemont hired Montâeclair to direct a French violin band and to compose dance music for a series of new operas that observers declared "the best in Italy" but are virtually unknown today. These productions involved collaborations among a mixed company of French and Italian musicians, dancers, composers, and librettists modeled on the practice of Turinese court operas. The book is an account of the contributions of these figures to the cultural life of Paris, Milan, and other northern Italian states, and to the creative mixing of musical styles, operatic conventions, and dance technique in France and Italy through the 1720s and beyond.

A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760

A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760
Author: Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 794
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780804744379

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.

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi
Author: Karl Heller
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2003-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1458412857

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.

The Jacobites at Urbino

The Jacobites at Urbino
Author: E. Corp
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230305369

Following the Glorious Revolution the court of the exiled Stuarts was for many years based in France, until after the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715, it was forced to move, eventually to be established in Rome. This book provides the first study of the court in transition, when exiled King James III lived in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino.