Opera Production
Opera Production

Author: Quaintance Eaton

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1961-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 081665753X

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Opera Production was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Designed particularly as a reference work for opera producers, students, performers, and writers, this book provides basic production information about more than 500 operas. Anyone planning to produce an opera will find here the essential information he needs in order to judge whether a given opera is appropriate to his resources for production. Information for individual operas is given concerning the number and importance of settings; size of orchestra, chorus, and ballet; number of singers, their relative importance and individual requirements; sources for obtaining musical materials' previous performances in America; and the opera story, its period, and composer. Extensive information about 150 full-length operas and 109 short operas is provided, with supplementary information about more than 260 other operas. The operas are alphabetized by title for easy reference. In order to condense the information as much as possible, codes and abbreviations are used, with keys and indexes at the back of the book. This book will be invaluable to those working in either amateur or professional companies, in opera workshops, in school, college, or civic opera groups. Those whose interest in opera is confined to the other side of the footlights will find the book absorbing, too, just as a glimpse backstage would be.

Words and Music
Words and Music

Author: Judith Beniston

Publisher: MHRA

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1907322086

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The chronological range covered by the individual essays is more than two hundred years, from the Classical Enlightenment to the early twenty-first century. Some of the studies encompassed by this volume undertake the analysis of one composer's settings of a particular poet's work - albeit with rather more critical rigour. Others trace the ways in which a literary text is modified and adapted before and as it develops as one of the principal components of an opera. Several share new insights into the complex relationships of individual works with the literary and musical traditions out of which they emerge (or which they transform and renew) - or set such works in the political contexts of their genesis or reception, often using a key historical moment, a turning-point or a 'snapshot', as the starting-point for a wide-ranging investigation. In some cases the words and the music are those of the same 'composer', the relationship here shedding light on the process of composition itself. Literary works are often scrutinized for the light they shed on a musician's creative processes, but the importance of music to writers - as audiences, but also as amateur or even semi-professional practitioners - is no less important as an investigative standpoint.