Gioachino Rossini

Gioachino Rossini

Author: Denise Gallo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1135847010

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Giochino Rossini: A Research and Information Guide is designed as a tool for those beginning to study the life and works of Gioachino Rossini as well as for those who wish to explore beyond the established biographies and commentaries. The first edition was published in 2001, and represented a survey of some 878 publications relating to the composer’s life and works. The second edition is revised and updated to include the more than 150 books and articles written in the field of Rossini studies since then. Contents range from sources published in the early decades of the nineteenth century to works currently in progress. General subject areas include Rossini's biography, historical and analytical studies of his operatic and non-operatic compositions, his personal and professional associations, and the reassessment of his role in the development of nineteenth-century music.


The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini

The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini

Author: Nicholas Mathew

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0521768055

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Leading scholars re-evaluate the opposition between Beethoven and Rossini, the great symbolic duo of early nineteenth-century music.


The Orchestral Revolution

The Orchestral Revolution

Author: Emily I. Dolan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-01-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1107028256

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This book explores the relationship between the history of orchestration and the development of modern musical aesthetics in the Enlightenment. Using Haydn as a focal point, it examines how the consolidation of the modern orchestra radically altered how people listened to and thought about the expressive capacity of instruments.


Music in the Present Tense

Music in the Present Tense

Author: Emanuele Senici

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-11-13

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 022666368X

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In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.


The Castrato

The Castrato

Author: Martha Feldman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-08-02

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0520292448

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The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.


The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

Author: William Rothstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0197609686

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Though studying opera often requires attention to aesthetics, libretti, staging, singers, compositional history, and performance history, the music itself is central. This book examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, during the period from Rossini's first international successes to Italian unification. Detailed analyses of form, rhythm, melody, and harmony reveal concepts of musical structure different from those usually discussed by music theorists, calling into question the notion of a common practice. Taking an eclectic analytical approach, author William Rothstein uses ideas originating in several centuries, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first, to argue that operatic music can be heard not only as passionate vocality but also in terms of musical forms, pitch structures, and rhythmic patterns--that is, as carefully crafted music worth theoretical attention. Although no single theory accounts for everything, Rothstein's analysis shows how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice, one that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.


Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion

Author: Gabriela Cruz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190915064

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A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Renowned opera scholar Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling in a way never before experienced in the opera house, asserting that the concept of "spectacle" was the defining cultural apparatus of the art form after the 1820s. Parisian audiences at the Académie Royale de Musique were struck by the novelty and power of grand opera upon the introduction of gaslight illumination, a technological innovation that quickly influenced productions across the Western operatic world. With this innovation, grand opera transformed into an audio-visual spectacle, delivering dream-like images and evoking the ghosts of its audiences' past. Through case studies of operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi, Cruz demonstrates how these works became an increasingly sophisticated medium by which audiences could conjure up the past and be transported away from the breakdown of modern life. A historically informed narrative that traverses far and wide, from dingy popular theatres in post-revolutionary Paris, to nautical shows in London, and finally to Egyptian mummies, Grand Illusion provides a fresh departure from previous scholarship, highlighting the often-neglected visual side of grand opera.


Rossini in Restoration Paris

Rossini in Restoration Paris

Author: Benjamin Walton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-12-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0521870607

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A study of the hugely successful operas of Gioachino Rossini in 1820s Paris.


Romantic Anatomies of Performance

Romantic Anatomies of Performance

Author: James Q. Davies

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0520958004

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Romantic Anatomies of Performance is concerned with the very matter of musical expression: the hands and voices of virtuosic musicians. Rubini, Chopin, Nourrit, Liszt, Donzelli, Thalberg, Velluti, Sontag, and Malibran were prominent celebrity pianists and singers who plied their trade between London and Paris, the most dynamic musical centers of nineteenth-century Europe. In their day, performers such as these provoked an avalanche of commentary and analysis, inspiring debates over the nature of mind and body, emotion and materiality, spirituality and mechanism, artistry and skill. J. Q. Davies revisits these debates, examining how key musicians and their contemporaries made sense of extraordinary musical and physical abilities. This is a history told as much from scientific and medical writings as traditionally musicological ones. Davies describes competing notions of vocal and pianistic health, contrasts techniques of training, and explores the ways in which music acts in the cultivation of bodies..