Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.
During the years preceding the composition of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner's aesthetics underwent a momentous turnaround, principally as a result of his discovery of Schopenhauer. Many of Schopenhauer's ideas, especially those regarding music's metaphysical significance, resonated with patterns of thought that had long been central to Wagner's aesthetics, and Wagner described the entry of Schopenhauer into his life as "a gift from heaven." Chafe argues that Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is a musical and dramatic exposition of metaphysical ideas inspired by Schopenhauer. The first part of the book covers the philosophical and literary underpinnings of the story, exploring Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Gottfried van Strassburg's Tristan poem. Chafe then turns to the events in the opera, providing tonal and harmonic analyses that reinforce his interpretation of the drama. Chafe acts as an expert guide, interpreting and illustrating most important moments for his reader. Ultimately, Chafe creates a critical account of Tristan, in which the drama is shown to develop through the music.
Gateways to Understanding Music, Second Edition, explores music in all the categories that constitute contemporary musical experience: European classical, popular, jazz, and world music. Covering the oldest forms of human music making to the newest, this chronology presents music from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective. Each of 60 "gateways" addresses a particular genre, style, or period of music. Every gateway opens with a guided listening example that unlocks a world of music through careful study of its structural elements. How did the piece come to be composed or performed? How did it respond to the social and cultural issues at the time, and what does that music mean today? Students learn to listen to, explain, understand, and ultimately value all the music they encounter in their world. New to this edition is a broader selection of musical examples that reflect the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion advocated by North American universities. Eight gateways have been replaced. A timeline of gateways helps students see the book’s historical narrative at a glance. Features Values orientation—Diverse, equitable, and inclusive approach to music history. All genres of music—Presents all music as worthy of study, including classical, world, popular, and jazz. Global scope within a historical narrative—Begins with small-scale forager societies up to the present, with a shifting focus from global to European to American influences. Recurring themes — Aesthetics, emotion, social life, links to culture, politics, economics, and technology. Modular framework—60 gateways—each with a listening example—allow flexibility to organize chronologically or by the seven themes. Consistent structure—With the same step-by-step format, students learn through repeated practice how to listen and how to think about music. Anthology of scores—For those courses that use the textbook in a music history sequence. Gateways to Understanding Music continues to employ a website to host the audio examples and instructor’s resources.
A multilayered masterpiece of fevered imagination and eroticism, Liebestod soars as the consummate work by one of America's greatest comic geniuses. As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, Liebestod returns us to Leslie Epstein’s most compelling literary character, that European émigré and meagerly successful musician, Leib Goldkorn, whose final years as a randy centenarian in New York City end in one of the most memorable swan songs in recent fiction. Invited back to his hometown in Moravia, Leib discovers that his father is not a hops magnate but actually one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Gustav Mahler. Returning to New York with a bevy of rabbinical cousins, Leib, now besotted by a world-famed diva, is determined to bring to the Metropolitan Opera Rubezahl, the only opera his real father ever wrote. Yet the much-heralded premiere turns into a fiasco of unimaginable proportions, all breathtakingly relayed by a stunned newspaper correspondent who survives to report on this monumental disaster. With Liebestod, Epstein once again “illuminates the mystery of our common humanity and mortality” (New York Times).
The Stendhal Syndrome is named for the French novelist, who on a visit to Florence had such a visceral and physical reaction to its beauty that he wrote, "I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall." Now Terrence McNally, one of our most beloved playwrights, has crafted two stunning and witty plays about art and how it transforms us. Full Frontal Nudity explores the reaction of three American tourists to the perfection and beauty of Michelangelo's David. In Prelude and Liebstod, a renowned conductor watches his life unravel while conducting Wagner's musical masterpiece. With its world premiere in the winter of 2004 starring Frank Langella and Isabella Rossellini, The Stendhal Syndrome will join the ranks of important plays by this American master.
Well-researched compilation of music information, analyzes nearly 1,000 of the world's most familiar melodies -- composers, lyricists, copyright date, first lines of music, lyrics, and other data. Includes 30 black-and-white illustrations.
The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the ’notes themselves,’ in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.
An exploration of the lives and works of Verdi and Wagner as well as their respective legacies to the present day, written by a noted cultural critic. This is the first book to compare these two composers and cultural heroes, both of whom were born in 1813 and achieved huge national and inter- national renown in their lifetimes. Yet not only did they never meet, but the differences between them—in music, culture, environment, significance, and legacy—were profound. Peter Conrad begins his tale in a public park in Venice, home to a pair of statues of the composers that are positioned so as to appear to shun each other. This provides a fitting starting point for his argument that they represent two opposite yet equally integral and compelling dimensions of European culture: north versus south, cerebral versus sensual, proud solitude versus human connection, epic mythmaking versus humane magnanimity. The book is a richly argued tour de force that engages passionately and profoundly with music, biography, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, and culture in the broadest sense. As Conrad concludes, “At one time or another, if not simultaneously, we still need the two contradictory, complementary kinds of music that Verdi and Wagner left us.”
During the years preceding the composition of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner's aesthetics underwent a momentous turnaround, principally as a result of his discovery of Schopenhauer. Many of Schopenhauer's ideas, especially those regarding music's metaphysical significance, resonated with patterns of thought that had long been central to Wagner's aesthetics, and Wagner described the entry of Schopenhauer into his life as "a gift from heaven." Chafe argues that Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is a musical and dramatic exposition of metaphysical ideas inspired by Schopenhauer. The first part of the book covers the philosophical and literary underpinnings of the story, exploring Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Gottfried van Strassburg's Tristan poem. Chafe then turns to the events in the opera, providing tonal and harmonic analyses that reinforce his interpretation of the drama. Chafe acts as an expert guide, interpreting and illustrating most important moments for his reader. Ultimately, Chafe creates a critical account of Tristan, in which the drama is shown to develop through the music.
