Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Author: Winton Dean

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 771

ISBN-13: 9781843835257

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The first volume of this monumental study of Handel's operatic works, covering the first seventeen operas.


Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Author: Winton Dean

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 830

ISBN-13:

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'This volume is a monument to the source-critical method. It is a rigorous investigation of the bewilderingly abundant musical and literary sources of each opera, and its most lasting influence will be on all future editions of Handel's music.'


Essays on Opera

Essays on Opera

Author: Winton Dean

Publisher: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13:

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30 essays on opera, written between 1952 and 1985, are collected and arranged by topic.


The Rival Sirens

The Rival Sirens

Author: Suzanne Aspden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1107067766

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The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women, Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers, as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth century.


Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Handel's Operas, 1704-1726

Author: Winton Dean

Publisher: Oxford [Oxfordshire] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 751

ISBN-13: 9780193152199

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After two centures of near-total neglect, Handel's operas are now increasingly popular in the theatre, but modern productions are hampered by dependence on obsolete and inaccurate editions, and by ignorance of the musical and theatrical practice of Handel's age. Although Handel's autographs and performing scores have long been available, they have never before been fully studied, still less the very early manuscript copies. The manuscripts have yielded a great deal of unknown music, besides throwing fresh light on Handel's methods of composition and performance practice. This book covers Handel's first seventeen surviving operas, including his greatest and most successful. Each opera has a chapter, with a full synopsis of the libretto (including all original stage directions) and a comparison with its literary and dramatic sources. Each chapter covers the history of the opera in performance and the different versions in the manuscripts. Every known surviving manuscript has been examined. Eight appendices cover all performances in Handel's time, borrowings, modern revivals, new information on his singers, and a complete index of Italian first lines in all Handel's works. About the Authors: Wynton Dean is the author of Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques. John Merrill Knapp is Emeritus Professor of Music at Princeton University.


A Poetics of Handel's Operas

A Poetics of Handel's Operas

Author: Nathan Link

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0197651348

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"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"--


Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History

Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History

Author: Ian D. Biddle

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1409420965

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What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions.


Opera in the Age of Rousseau

Opera in the Age of Rousseau

Author: David Charlton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-10-25

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0521887607

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A wide-ranging account of opera on stage and in society in the age of Rousseau, from Rameau to Gluck.