Spanning 400 years of musical drama, Eyewitness Companions: Opera is your guide to the musical world. Explore operas and composers from the late Renaissance on, including such classical masters as Verdi, Puccini, and Bizet. Eyewitness Companions: Opera is the complete visual guidebook to the great operas, their composers and performance history. Eyewitness Companions: Opera includes more than 160 operas by 66 composers around the world. This richly illustrated eBook includes act-by-act plot synopses and storyline highlights, plus detailed profiles cover composers, Librettists, singers, and more.
You are getting ready for a performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and you have a few questions. How many clarinets are in the orchestra? How many orchestra members appear onstage? How many different sets are there? How long does the opera typically run? What are the key arias? Are any special effects or ballet choreography required? Who owns the rights? Where was it premiered? What are the leading and supporting roles? The Opera Manual is the only single source for the answers to these and other important questions. It is the ultimate companion for opera lovers, professionals, scholars, and teachers, featuring comprehensive information about, and plot summaries for, more than 550 operas—including every opera that is likely to be performed today, from standard to rediscovered contemporary works. The book is invaluable, especially for opera professionals, who will find everything they need for choosing and staging operas. But it is also a treasure for listeners. Similar reference books commonly skip over scenes and supporting characters in their plot summaries, lacking even the most basic facts about staging, orchestral, and vocal requirements. The Opera Manual, based on the actual scores of the works discussed, is the only exhaustive, up-to-date opera companion—a “recipe book” that will enable its readers to explore those operas they know and discover new ones to sample and enjoy.
"Abandoned as a baby at the Ospedale della Pietà, Isabella dal Cello has spent her entire life wondering why her mother deserted her. Now she is an ambitious teen who has worked hard to earn a place playing her cello in the orphanage's prestigious orchestra."--Page 4 of cover.
Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors – Dante Alighieri, Machiavelli, and Boccaccio – and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.
Although many opera dictionaries and encyclopedias are available, very few are devoted exclusively to operas in a single language. In this revised and expanded edition of Operas in English: A Dictionary, Margaret Ross Griffel brings up to date her original work on operas written specifically to an English text (including works both originally prepared in English, as well as English translations). Since its original publication in 1999, Griffel has added nearly 800 entries to the 4,300 from the original volume, covering the world of opera in the English language from 1634 through 2011. Listed alphabetically by letter, each opera entry includes alternative titles, if any; a full, descriptive title; the number of acts; the composer’s name; the librettist’s name, the original language of the libretto, and the original source of the text, with the source title; the date, place, and cast of the first performance; the date of composition, if it occurred substantially earlier than the premiere date; similar information for the first U.S. (including colonial) and British (i.e., in England, Scotland, or Wales) performances, where applicable; a brief plot summary; the main characters (names and vocal ranges, where known); some of the especially noteworthy numbers cited by name; comments on special musical problems, techniques, or other significant aspects; and other settings of the text, including non-English ones, and/or other operas involving the same story or characters (cross references are indicated by asterisks). Entries also include such information as first and critical editions of the score and libretto; a bibliography, ranging from scholarly studies to more informal journal articles and reviews; a discography; and information on video recordings. Griffel also includes four appendixes, a selective bibliography, and two indexes. The first appendix lists composers, their places and years of birth and death, and their operas included in the text as entries; the second does the same for librettists; the third records authors whose works inspired or were adapted for the librettos; and the fourth comprises a chronological listing of the A–Z entries, including as well as the date of first performance, the city of the premiere, the short title of the opera, and the composer. Griffel also include a main character index and an index of singers, conductors, producers, and other key figures.
Nineteenth-century Paris attracted foreign musicians like a magnet. The city boasted a range of theatres and of genres represented there, a wealth of libretti and source material for them, vocal, orchestral and choral resources, to say nothing of the set designs, scenery and costumes. All this contributed to an artistic environment that had musicians from Italian- and German-speaking states beating a path to the doors of the Académie Royale de Musique, Opéra-Comique, Théâtre Italien, Théâtre Royal de l'Odéon and Théâtre de la Renaissance. This book both tracks specific aspects of this culture, and examines stage music in Paris through the lens of one of its most important figures: Giacomo Meyerbeer. The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris. Meyerbeer's acculturation to Parisian theatrical mores is then examined, especially his moves from the Odéon and Opéra-Comique to the opera house where he eventually made his greatest impact - the Académie Royale de Musique; the shift from Opéra-Comique is then counterpointed by an examination of how an indigenous Parisian composer, Fromental Halévy, made exactly the same leap at more or less the same time. The book continues with the fates of other composers in Paris: Weber, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner, but concludes with the final Parisian successes that Meyerbeer lived to see - his two opéras comiques.
