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Author: John W. Freeman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 504
ISBN-13: 9780393040517
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContains the plots of 150 of the world's most popular operas, short biographies of the 72 composers represented, plus background material pertinent to each work.
Author: Charles Affron
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2014-09-22
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 0520958977
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to life dominant personalities and memorable performances of the time. From the opening night Faust to the recent controversial production of Wagner’s "Ring," Grand Opera is a remarkable account of management and audience response to the push and pull of tradition and reinvention. Spanning the decades between the Gilded Age and the age of new media, this story of the Met concludes by tipping its hat to the hugely successful "Live in HD" simulcasts and other twenty-first-century innovations. Grand Opera’s appeal extends far beyond the large circle of opera enthusiasts. Drawing on unpublished documents from the Metropolitan Opera Archives, reviews, recordings, and much more, this richly detailed book looks at the Met in the broad context of national and international issues and events.
Author: Johanna Fiedler
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2003-09-09
Total Pages: 445
ISBN-13: 1400032318
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf the opera world is full of “intrigue, double meanings, and devious dramatics,” then no place exemplifies this more than the world-famous Metropolitan Opera, where politics, ambition, and oversized egos have traditionally taken center stage along with some of the world’s richest music. Drawing on her fifteen years as its press representative, Johanna Fiedler explodes the traditional secrecy that surrounds the Met in this wonderfully entertaining account of its tumuluous history. Fiedler chronicles the Met’s early days as a home for legends like Toscanini, Mahler, and Caruso, and gives a fascinating account of the middle years when haughty blue-bloods battled stubborn adminstrators for control of a company that would emerge as America’s premiere opera house. She takes us behind the grand gold-curtain stage in more recent years as well, showing how musical superstars like Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and Kathleen Battle have electrified performances and scandalized the public. But most revelatory are Fiedler’s portrayals of James Levine and Joseph Volpe and their practically parallel ascendancies—Levine rising from prodigy to artistic director, Volpe advancing from stagehand to general manager—and their once strained relationship. Weaving together the personal, economic, and artistic struggles that characterize the Met’s long and vibrant history, Molto Agitato is a must-read saga of power, wealth, and, above all, great music.
Author: Henry W. Simon
Publisher:
Published: 1957
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Luigi Illica
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Published: 2013-10-01
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 1574674501
DOWNLOAD EBOOK(Amadeus). An idealistic artist, a celebrated opera singer, and a corrupt police chief engage in a fierce battle of wills in this tempestuous tale of passion, intrigue, cruelty, and deception. Puccini's great melodrama may be set in 1800, amid the Napoleonic wars, but the conflicts between love and loyalty, the state and the individual, and hypocrisy and principle are anything but dated. Floria Tosca, the beautiful, glamorous singer who has all of Rome at her feet, is one of the iconic soprano roles in the Italian repertoire. She's caught between two men: her lover, the handsome painter Cavaradossi, who defies the law to hide a rebel friend; and the villainous Baron Scarpia, Rome's all-powerful chief of police, who will stop at nothing to crush the rebels and conquer Tosca for himself. This gripping story of torture, attempted rape, murder, suicide, and general mayhem is as thrilling and dramatic as anything seen on the operatic stage.
Author: Charles R. Beck
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2014-09-17
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1476617147
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCovering famous operas from 14 Italian, French and German composers, this handbook is designed to help listeners understand and appreciate the special skills required to sing famous operatic songs. The book includes a plot synopsis of each opera with information about each song, which are introduced in their dramatic settings along with the vocal requirements for the most demanding passages. Interactive literary and rhyming exercises help the reader become more engaged and knowledgeable. Foreign language passages are translated into English and key words are highlighted in each language. The operatic vocabulary is defined to help the listener better understand the technical demands for a highly trained voice. The book is designed as a useful handbook for both experienced and beginning opera listeners. Appendices provide information on singers, recordings and useful references.
Author: John W. Freeman
Publisher:
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 547
ISBN-13: 9780393018882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Lorenzo Da Ponte
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Published: 2014-04-01
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1574674587
DOWNLOAD EBOOK(Amadeus). For a long time, Cosi fan tutte was considered scandalous which is not entirely surprising, if you look at its story. After seeing their fiances, Guglielmo and Ferrando, go off to war, two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, all too rapidly overcome their grief and agree to marry two attractive strangers within the space of just a couple days. Little do the sisters know that the strangers are in fact those same fiances in disguise! The whole thing is a plot masterminded by a cynical old philosopher, Don Alfonso, and a clever maid, Despina. Scandalous or not, Cosi fan tutte has remained one of opera's most contemporary comedies.
Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-09-08
Total Pages: 648
ISBN-13: 0393089533
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.
Author: Nancy Ellison
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780847834631
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"...A photographic tribute to Otto Schenk's and James Levine's landmark production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen as it was performed for the last time at the Metropolitan Opera during the 2008-9 season."--dust jacket.
