The Castrati In Opera
Author: Angus Heriot
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Published: 1974-09-21
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13:
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The Castrati In Opera
Author: Angus Heriot
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Published: 1974-09-21
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe World of the Castrati
Author: Patrick Barbier
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780285634602
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis entertaining, authoritative book is the first study of the phenomenon of the castrati in relation to the baroque period, covering the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries, when the fashion for castrati was at its peak.
The Castrato
Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2016-08-02
Total Pages: 496
ISBN-13: 0520292448
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England
Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-02-18
Total Pages: 211
ISBN-13: 1108843611
DOWNLOAD EBOOKImplements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.
The Modern Castrato
Author: Patricia Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0199365202
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing.
Voicing Gender
Author: Naomi Adele André
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780253346445
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDocuments the changes in approaches to gender in opera in the early 19th century.
Cry to Heaven
Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1995-04-01
Total Pages: 578
ISBN-13: 0345396936
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time
Singers of Italian Opera
Author: John Rosselli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995-03-02
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780521426978
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAdelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly $5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Rosselli also examines the sexist prejudices against the castrati of the eighteenth century and against women singers. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdote, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.
Opera In The Flesh
Author: Sam Abel
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26
Total Pages: 214
ISBN-13: 1000308154
DOWNLOAD EBOOKVerdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, ‘These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.’ In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.
