Michael W. Balfe
Michael W. Balfe

Author: Basil Walsh

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13:

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Michael William Balfe (1808-1870) rose to fame in London in 1835 immediately after the premiere of his first opera, The Siege of Rochelle. For the next thirty-five years, this unique Dublin-born musician was destined to be the most important operatic composer in Victorian Britain. He was to music in Victorian Britain what his renowned contemporary, Charles Dickens, was to literature. The popularity of their respected works reached far beyond London, Dublin, and New York in the English speaking world. Balfe also personally achieved great success in places such as Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Bologna, Palermo, Trieste, and St. Petersburg in Russia. In all, he composed twenty-eight operatic works over his lifetime. However, when his French, Italian, and German language versions are added, he actually can be credited with forty-three operas. For over fifty years, his opera, The Bohemian Girl, swept around the globe with great success, having been translated into many different languages. This definitive biography took seven years of international research and is long overdue. It corrects many anecdotal errors of previous books. It documents Balfe the man, his work, his descendents, his legacy, and influence. The biography unearths many new facts about this important Victorian composer, his music, his family, and his role as a music director at London's Italian Opera House, where he directed the local premieres of several Verdi operas. It lists all of his operas with premiere casts and the principal arias. It also identifies the current location of all known Balfe's scores and music, including his early Italian compositions which have been deemed "lost" by most scholars. ~

Michael William Balfe
Michael William Balfe

Author: William Tyldesley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1351558307

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Without doubt, Michael William Balfe (1808-1870) was the most successful composer of English opera in the mid nineteenth century. During his lifetime he enjoyed an international reputation and worked with some of the leading singers of the time, including Jenny Lind, Malibran and Grisi. Drawing on previously unused source materials such as letters, legal documents and playbills, this biography of Balfe and in-depth study of his English operas overturns many of the previously accepted 'facts' of the composer's lifestyle. Using London as his base, Dublin-born Balfe spent long periods in Paris and travelled widely in Europe. William Tyldesley discusses the continental influences evident in Balfe's operas and offers new suggestions as to the draw that Paris held for the composer. Far from leading a fairly prosperous and unexceptional life, Balfe is shown to have found himself in financial straits on more than one occasion, and to have employed possibly unethical means of extracting himself from them. Those wishing to perform Balfe's works or to do further research into them, will find Tyldesley's re-examination of the composer a necessary first port of call.

Head and Shoulders
Head and Shoulders

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 35

ISBN-13: 1952438241

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A young, prospective intellectual, completely absorbed in his studies, is shown another side of life by an actress, leading everything to turn on its head.

Arthur Sullivan
Arthur Sullivan

Author: Arthur Jacobs

Publisher: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 9780931340512

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A full biography of a composer whose work extended far beyond the operettas for which he is known today.

Dubliners
Dubliners

Author: James Joyce

Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Published: 2014-05-25T00:00:00Z

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13:

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Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times. It took Joyce nine years to finally see his stories in print, but not before seeing a printer burn all but one copy of the proofs. Today Dubliners survives as a rich example of not just literary excellence, but of what everyday life was like for average Dubliners in their day. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Irish Rebel
Irish Rebel

Author: Terry Golway

Publisher: Merrion Press

Published: 2015-10-05

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1785370413

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Described by Padraig Pearse as the “greatest of the Fenians”, John Devoy was born before the Famine and lived to see the Irish tricolour flying from Dublin Castle. The descendent of a rebel family, he was an avowed Fenian who went into exile in New York in 1871. Over the next half-century he was the most-prominent leader of the Irish-American nationalist movement. Every Irish leader from Parnell to Pearse sought his counsel. He organised a dramatic rescue of Fenian prisoners from Australia, rallied Irish America behind the Land War, served as a middle man between the Easter rebels and the German government, and helped move Irish-American opinion in favour of the Treaty. When he died in 1928, Devoy was accorded a state funeral and a hero’s burial in Ireland. This new revised edition of the acclaimed biography of this overlooked architect of the Irish independence movement is also the story of Ireland, and of Irish-America, from the Famine to Freedom, examining the extraordinary cloak-and-dagger planning of the Easter Rising and the critical role of America in its outcome. “The Devoy story, in Terry Golway’s hands, combines wide scholarship and adventure: it reads like a novel. Get a comfortable chair when you read this book: you won’t be able to put it down.” – Frank McCourt “Terry Golway tells the story of this exceptional man with affection and deft narrative sense…this book will charm and enlighten readers.” – Thomas Keneally

Irish Classical Recordings
Irish Classical Recordings

Author: Axel Klein

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 2001-09-30

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Though the term Irish music typically evokes images of fiddles, flutes, and Riverdance, Ireland and its culture have also given rise to a wealth of orchestral music, including compositions ranging from string quartets to operas. In this important new work, author Axel Klein provides much more than a mere discography: he documents and promotes a largely unknown aspect of Irish culture in a unique combination of discographical and biographical information. Featuring ninety-three recorded Irish composers and forty-three international composers influenced by Irish music, the volume offers the means for scholars and general readers alike to familiarize themselves with a subject to which most of the world, until now, has not been exposed. As most of the music described is currently available on compact disc, Klein's compilation serves as an invaluable resource guide for both academics and amateur enthusiasts.