Eugène Scribe und das europäische Musiktheater

Download Eugène Scribe und das europäische Musiktheater PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Eugène Scribe und das europäische Musiktheater by : Sebastian Werr

Download or read book Eugène Scribe und das europäische Musiktheater written by Sebastian Werr and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Scribe war gar nicht musikalisch; er spielte kein Instrument und hat sicherlich niemals eine Gesangslektion gehabt. Trotzdem darf man ihn einen großen musikalischen Erfinder nennen. Er hat nämlich [.] das Genie für jene dramatischen Situationen besessen, welche der Musik neue Wege eröffnen'. (Eduard Hanslick) Die Libretti von Eugène Scribe beherrschten im 19. Jahrhundert alle Gattungen des Musiktheaters. Elf Beiträge untersuchen in exemplarischen Fallbeispielen Produktion und europaweite Rezeption seiner Texte.

Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III

Download Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
ISBN 13 : 3990120735
Total Pages : 781 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III by : Michael Hüttler

Download or read book Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III written by Michael Hüttler and published by Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 3 May 1810 George Gordon, Lord Byron, swam like the mythic Leander from Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont to Abydos on the Asian shore. The hero of his poem "Don Juan" has lived in “feminine disguise” in the sultan's harem for more than a century. To commemorate Byron's Don Juan, the third volume of the "Ottoman Empire and European Theatre" series focuses on the image of the harem in literature and theatre. Nineteen international contributors explore historical conceptions of the Ottoman harem and seraglio in British, French and South East European sources from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Contributions by Jennifer L. Airey, Gönül Bakay, Michael Chappell, Anne Greenfield, Isobel Grundy, Bent Holm, Michael Hüttler, Hans Peter Kellner, Emily M. N. Kugler, Andreas Münzmay, Domenica Newell-Amato, Walter Puchner, Marian Gilbart Read, Käthe Springer, Stefanie Steiner, Laura Tunbridge, Himmet Umunc, Hans Ernst Weidinger, Mi Zhou.

Grand Opera Outside Paris

Download Grand Opera Outside Paris PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315466430
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Grand Opera Outside Paris by : Jens Hesselager

Download or read book Grand Opera Outside Paris written by Jens Hesselager and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century French grand opera was a musical and cultural phenomenon with an important and widespread transnational presence in Europe. Primary attention in the major studies of the genre has so far been on the Parisian context for which the majority of the works were originally written. In contrast, this volume takes account of a larger geographical and historical context, bringing the Europe-wide impact of the genre into focus. The book presents case studies including analyses of grand opera in small-town Germany and Switzerland; grand operas adapted for Scandinavian capitals, a cockney audience in London, and a court audience in Weimar; and Portuguese and Russian grand operas after the French model. Its overarching aim is to reveal how grand operas were used – performed, transformed, enjoyed and criticised, emulated and parodied – and how they became part of musical, cultural and political life in various European settings. The picture that emerges is complex and diversified, yet it also testifies to the interrelated processes of cultural and political change as bourgeois audiences, at varying paces and with local variations, increased their influence, and as discourses on language, nation and nationalism influenced public debates in powerful ways.

Laughter Between Two Revolutions

Download Laughter Between Two Revolutions PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1580462936
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (84 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Laughter Between Two Revolutions by : Francesco Izzo (Musicologist)

Download or read book Laughter Between Two Revolutions written by Francesco Izzo (Musicologist) and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the forgotten story of post-Rossinian opera buffa, with attention to masterpieces by Donizetti and fascinating comic works by Luigi Ricci, the young Verdi, and other composers. This study represents the first substantial assessment of Italian comic operas composed during the central years of the Risorgimento -- the period during which upheavals, revolutions, and wars ultimately led to the liberation andunification of Italy. Music historians often view the period as one during which serious Romantic opera flourished in Italy while opera buffa inexorably declined. Laughter between Two Revolutions revises this widespread notion by viewing well-known comic masterpieces -- such as Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843) -- as part of a still-thriving tradition. Also examined are opere buffe by LuigiRicci, Lauro Rossi, Verdi (Un giorno di regno), and others, many of which circulated widely at the time. Francesco Izzo's pathbreaking study argues that in the "realm of seriousness" of mid-nineteenth-century Italy, comedywas not an anachronistic intruder, but a significant and vital cultural presence. This important volume offers new insights into opera history and theories of comedy in the arts. It will be of interest to opera lovers everywhere and to students in music, philosophy, comparative literature, and Italian cultural studies. Francesco Izzo is senior lecturer in music at the University of Southampton.

Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses

Download Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316351874
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (163 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses by : Christina Fuhrmann

Download or read book Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses written by Christina Fuhrmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'. The operas were translated into English, fitted with spoken dialogue, divested of much of their music, augmented with interpolations and frequently set to altered libretti. By the end of the period, the radical changes of earlier adaptations gave way to more faithful versions. In the first comprehensive study of these adaptations, Christina Fuhrmann shows how integral they are to our understanding of early nineteenth-century opera and the transformation of London's theatrical and musical life. This book reveals how these operas accelerated repertoire shifts in the London theatrical world, fostered significant changes in musical taste, revealed the ambiguities and inadequacies of copyright law and sparked intense debate about fidelity to the original work.

The Politics of Musical Identity

Download The Politics of Musical Identity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351541471
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Politics of Musical Identity by : Annegret Fauser

Download or read book The Politics of Musical Identity written by Annegret Fauser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the way in which composers, performers, and critics shaped individual and collective identities in music from Europe and the United States from the 1860s to the 1950s. Selected essays and articles engage with works and their reception by Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet (in an American incarnation), Lili and Nadia Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, and with performers such as Wanda Landowska and even Marilyn Monroe. Ranging in context from the opera house through the concert hall to the salon, and from establishment cultures to counter-cultural products, the main focus is how music permits new ways of considering issues of nationality, class, race, and gender. These essays - three presented for the first time in English translation - reflect the work in both musical and cultural studies of a distinguished scholar whose international career spans the Atlantic and beyond.

America in Italy

Download America in Italy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140088781X
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis America in Italy by : Axel Körner

Download or read book America in Italy written by Axel Körner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American "domestic manners" were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, America in Italy is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.

Daniel-François-Esprit Auber

Download Daniel-François-Esprit Auber PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443825972
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Daniel-François-Esprit Auber by : Robert Ignatius Letellier

Download or read book Daniel-François-Esprit Auber written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871), the composer of La Muette de Portici (1828) and Fra Diavolo (1830), was once regarded as one of the great figures of music, a staple of the operatic repertoire in France, and indeed around the world. It is now almost impossible to understand the extent of his once universal fame, his influence on contemporary composers. His operas were in the theatre repertories of the world until the 1920s, and innumerable arrangements of them were published and sold everywhere. The ubiquity of his overtures—Masaniello, Fra Diavolo, The Bronze Horse, The Black Domino, The Crown Diamonds—once as popular as those of Rossini and Suppé, and the influence of his melodies and dance rhythms on piano and instrumental music, and on Romantic comic opera, was overwhelming. In his operas Auber avoided any excess in dramatic expression; all emotion and expressiveness, any vivid depiction of local milieu, were realized within his discreetly nuanced tones, always stamped with a Parisian elegance. His operas were loved in his native France until the years before the First World War, with Fra Diavolo and Le Domino noir last performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1909. Auber’s career was a record of this success and appreciation. His appointment to the Institute (1829) was followed by other prestigious posts: as Director of Concerts at Court (1839), director of the Paris Conservatoire (1842), Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel (1852), and Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneur (1861). During his lifetime, six biographies appeared contemporaneously, with another six appearing posthumously in the period up to 1914. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, reactions to Wagner, Impressionism and the Neo-Classicism of the Ballet Russe resulted in a growing lack of interest in the ancient traditions of opéra-comique, with its charming plots, melodic directness and rhythmic élan. Boieldieu, Hérold, Adam and Auber were relegated to the dustbin of history. Only in Germany did the genre continue to flourish; Auber’s most enduring work is still performed there. His death in pitiful conditions during the Siege of Paris (1871), in the city he always loved, marked the end of an era. Auber now occupies a shadowy niche in the general consciousness as the name of the metro station nearest the Palais Garnier, and remains unknown and neglected (apart of course from Fra Diavolo), although his impact on the nineteenth-century operatic theatre was just as great as Rossini’s. The time has surely come for Auber’s life and work, especially in association with his life-long collaborator Eugène Scribe (1791-1861)—master dramatist and supreme librettist, a determining force in the history of opera—to be reassessed. Perhaps then the world will begin to hear more of Auber’s elegant gracious, life-affirming music, written to Scribe’s words. The aim of the present study is to offer an overview of the life and work of Auber by close examination of his forty operas, with consideration of origins, casting, plot, analysis of dramaturgy and musical style, and reception history. This is presented in the context of Auber's relationship to the dominant genres of early nineteenth century French culture, opéra comique and grand opéra. The three evolving periods of Auber's unique involvement with opéra comique are of principal concern. This analysis of the operas is made in the context of Auber's crucial working relationship with Scribe, who provided 38 of his libretti. Their cooperation is unique and of great importance on several literary, musical and cultural levels. The nature of their interaction and personal friendship is assessed by a translation of the extant correspondence between them, some 80 letters that have not appeared in English before. The presentation of each opera is illustrated by musical examples from all the scores, prints from the complete works of Scribe and other theatrical memorabilia. The study also contains bibliographies of Auber’s works and their contemporary arrangements, studies of Auber’s and Scribe’s life and work, their artistic and historical milieux, and a discography.

The Oxford Handbook of Opera

Download The Oxford Handbook of Opera PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199714843
Total Pages : 1217 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Opera by : Helen M. Greenwald

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Opera written by Helen M. Greenwald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What IS opera? Contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Opera respond to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: Words, Music, and Meaning; Performance and Production; Opera and Society; and Transmission and Reception. Individual essays engage with repertoire from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Meyerbeer to Strauss, Henze, and Adams in studies of composition, national identity, transmission, reception, sources, media, iconography, humanism, the art of collecting, theory, analysis, commerce, singers, directors, criticism, editions, politics, staging, race, and gender. The title of the penultimate section, Opera on the Edge, suggests the uncertainty of opera's future: is opera headed toward catastrophe or have social and musical developments of the last hundred years stimulated something new and exciting, and, well, operatic? In an epilogue to the volume, a contemporary opera composer speaks candidly about opera composition today. The Oxford Handbook of Opera is an essential companion to scholars, educators, advanced students, performers, and knowledgeable listeners: those who simply love opera.

The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera

Download The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139825895
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (398 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera by : David Charlton

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera written by David Charlton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-04 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2003 Companion is a fascinating and accessible exploration of the world of grand opera. Through this volume a team of scholars and writers on opera examine those important Romantic operas which embraced the Shakespearean sweep of tragedy, history, love in time of conflict, and the struggle for national self-determination. Rival nations, rival religions and violent resolutions are common elements, with various social or political groups represented in the form of operatic choruses. The book traces the origins and development of a style created during an increasingly technical age, which exploited the world-renowned skills of Parisian stage-designers, artists, and dancers as well as singers. It analyses in detail the grand operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy, discusses grand opera in Russia and Germany, and also in the Czech lands, Italy, Britain and the Americas. The volume also includes an essay by the renowned opera director David Pountney.

Dante and Italy in British Romanticism

Download Dante and Italy in British Romanticism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230119972
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (31 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dante and Italy in British Romanticism by : F. Burwick

Download or read book Dante and Italy in British Romanticism written by F. Burwick and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust

Download Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139495852
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust by : Cormac Newark

Download or read book Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust written by Cormac Newark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comédie humaine to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.

A Short History of Opera

Download A Short History of Opera PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231507720
Total Pages : 1047 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Short History of Opera by : Donald J. Grout

Download or read book A Short History of Opera written by Donald J. Grout and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-18 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have. The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day. A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included. With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.

The Frightful Stage

Download The Frightful Stage PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781845454593
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (545 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Frightful Stage by : Robert Justin Goldstein

Download or read book The Frightful Stage written by Robert Justin Goldstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class's time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology

Download Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190646926
Total Pages : 553 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology by : Matthew Gelbart

Download or read book Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology written by Matthew Gelbart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European Romanticism gave rise to a powerful discourse equating genres to constrictive rules and forms that great art should transcend; and yet without the categories and intertextual references we hold in our minds, "music" would be meaningless noise. Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology teases out that paradox, charting the workings and legacies of Romantic artistic values such as originality and anti-commercialism in relation to musical genre. Genre's persistent power was amplified by music's inevitably practical social, spatial, and institutional frames. Furthermore, starting in the nineteenth century, all music, even the most anti-commercial, was stamped by its relationship to the marketplace, entrenching associations between genres and target publics (whether based on ideas of nation, gender, class, or more subtle aspects of identity). These newly strengthened correlations made genre, if anything, more potent rather than less, despite Romantic claims. In case studies from across nineteenth-century Europe engaging with canonical music by Bizet, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, and Brahms, alongside representative genres such as opéra-comique and the piano ballade, Matthew Gelbart explores the processes through which composers, performers, critics, and listeners gave sounds, and themselves, a sense of belonging. He examines genre vocabulary and discourse, the force of generic titles, how avant-garde music is absorbed through and into familiar categories, and how interpretation can be bolstered or undercut by genre agreements. Even in a modern world where transcription and sound recording can take any music into an infinite array of new spatial and social situations, we are still locked in the Romantics' ambivalent tussle with genre.

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864

Download The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838638453
Total Pages : 732 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864 by : Giacomo Meyerbeer

Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The last years, 1857-1864 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 4 is devoted to the last years (1857-64); while age and declining health saw a waning of the composer's personal optimism. It contains a series of glossaries listing his compositions and the musical and theatrical works he attended throughout his life, as well as a bibliography.

The Meyerbeer Libretti

Download The Meyerbeer Libretti PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443846929
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Meyerbeer Libretti by : Richard Arsenty

Download or read book The Meyerbeer Libretti written by Richard Arsenty and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier. In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of use. The eleventh volume presents the fourth of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras, and his final work. By 1860 long-imposed labor had started to tell upon the composer’s health: he knew that he must concentrate on the “navigator project” which he had started twenty years earlier if he intended to finish it. Meyerbeer died on 2 May 1864, the day after the completion of the copying of the full score of this his last opera, Vasco da Gama. Minna Meyerbeer and César-Victor Perrin, the director of the Opéra, entrusted the editing of a performing edition to the famous Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis, while the libretto was revised by Mélesville. The original title of L’Africaine was restored out of deference to public expectation. Much of the music and action was suppressed, in spite of the strain this inflicted on the internal logic of the story. While L'Africaine is not lacking in the grandeur of statement and stirring climaxes for which the composer was so famous, there is a new intimacy, a new intensity of melancholic lyricism. Like its famous predecessors, it is basically an historical work, derived from the period of sixteenth-century Renaissance. The account of Vasco da Gama's voyage of discovery around the Cape of Good Hope and conquest of Calicut (1497-98) is subjected to a fictional treatment that raises many interesting issues. The framework is historical, but most of the characters and course of action are not; in fact the end of the opera, in the suicide of the heroine, suddenly leaves the terra firma of reality, and transports us into the mystical realms of the spirit. It is this mixture of modes that is central to the dramaturgy of L'Africaine, a confusion of history and fairytale, ancient certainties and challenging discoveries, in the creation of a new mythology. There is also originality in formal developments, with the great tenor scene in act 4 providing a new malleability in handling the constraints of shape and genre: recitative, arioso and cabaletta have a fluent integration in trying to explore the text more pointedly. L’Africaine was produced on 28 April 1865, a great posthumous tribute to its famous creators. The Ship Scene, the exotic Indian act, and the Scene of the Manchineel Tree exerted a fascination on audiences, and elicited new praise. The work full of melodic beauty and rapturous lyricism, began a triumphal progress through the world, beginning with the big stages of London and Berlin.