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Opera And Politics
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Book Synopsis The Politics of Opera by : Mitchell Cohen
Download or read book The Politics of Opera written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.
Download or read book Opera and Politics written by John Bokina and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent do operas express the political and cultural ideas of their age? How do they reflect the composer's view of the changing relations among art, politics, and society? In this book John Bokina focuses on political aspects and meanings of operas from the baroque to postmodern period, showing the varied ways that operas become sensuous vehicles for the articulation of political ideas. Bokina begins with an analysis of Monteverdi's three extant operas, which address in an oblique way the political and ideological dualities of aristocratic rule in the seventeenth-century Italy. He then moves to Mozart's "Don Giovanni", which he views as a celebration of the demise of a predatory aristocracy. He presents Beethoven's "Fidelio" as an example of the political spirit of a revolution based on republican virtue, and Wagner's "Parsifal" as a utopian music drama that projects romantic anticapitalist ideals onto an imagined past. He shows that Strauss's "Elektra" and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" transform the traditional operatic depiction of madness by reflecting the emerging Freudian psychoanalysis of that era. And he argues that operas by Pfitzner, Hindemith, and Schoenberg explore the political roles of art and the artists, each couching contemporary conditions in an allegory about the fate of art in a historical period of transition. Finally, Bokina offers a reappraisal of Henze's "The Bassarids" as a political opera that confronts the promise and limits of the sensual-sexual revolt of the twentieth-century.
Book Synopsis Opera and the City by : Andrea Goldman
Download or read book Opera and the City written by Andrea Goldman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
Book Synopsis Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan by : Nancy Guy
Download or read book Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan written by Nancy Guy and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan tells the peculiar story of an art caught in a sea of ideological ebbs and flows. Nancy Guy demonstrates the potential significance of the political environment for an art form's development, ranging from determining the smallest performative details (such as how a melody can or cannot be composed) to whether a tradition ultimately thrives or withers away.When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and military retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they brought along numerous Peking opera performers. Expecting that this symbolically important art would strengthen regime legitimacy and authority, they generously supported Peking opera's perpetuation in exile. Valuing mainland Chinese culture above Taiwanese culture, the Nationalists generously supported Peking opera to the virtual exclusion of local performing traditions, despite their wider popularity. Later, as Taiwan turned toward democracy, the island's own "indigenous" products became more highly valued and Peking opera found itself on a tenuous footing. Finally, in 1995, all of its opera troupes and schools (formerly supported by the Ministry of Defense) were dismantled.Nancy Guy investigates the mechanisms through which Peking Opera was perpetuated, controlled, and ultimately disempowered, and explores the artistic and political consequences of the state's involvement as its primary patron. Her study provides a unique perspective on the interplay between ideology and power within Taiwan's dynamic society.Nancy Guy is an associate professor of music at the University of California, San Diego.
Book Synopsis Viva La Liberta! by : Anthony Arblaster
Download or read book Viva La Liberta! written by Anthony Arblaster and published by Verso. This book was released on 1992 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned guide to opera's political dimension. Taking us on a tour of 200 years of great opera, from "The Marriage of Figaro" to "Nixon in China", Anthony Arblaster uncovers the political dimension of an art form all too often considered as purely aesthetic and reveals opera's full vitality and passion for liberty.
Book Synopsis Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China by : Hsiao-t'i Li
Download or read book Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China written by Hsiao-t'i Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time."
Book Synopsis Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France by : Olivia Bloechl
Download or read book Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France written by Olivia Bloechl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
Book Synopsis Urban Politics and Cultural Capital by : Ma Haili
Download or read book Urban Politics and Cultural Capital written by Ma Haili and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male ‘beggar’s song’ of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and economic reforms in the new millennium. Previous publications have focused mainly on the historical development of Chinese theatre, with emphasis placed on Beijing opera. This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.
Book Synopsis Opera : passion, power and politics by : Kate Bailey
Download or read book Opera : passion, power and politics written by Kate Bailey and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opera is traditionally regarded as an elitist art form far removed from reality by its fantastical pots and melodramatic divas. This book shows that beneath the opulent sets and sumptuous costumes, opera is very much a product of its time. Like all the great narrative arts, it draws on essential human experiences to create a form that can be endlessly reinvented to reflect a changing society.Focusing on seven opera premieres in seven distinct cultural landscapes, with additional essays by contemporary practitioners including Placido Domingo, Antonio Pappano and Simone Young, the book culminates in the international explosion of opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The seven operas and premieres are: Venice (Monteverdi's L'Incoranazione di Poppea, 1642); London (Handel's Rinaldo, 1711); Vienna (Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, 1786); Milan (Verdi's Nabucco, 1842); Paris (Wagner's Tannhauser, 1861); Dresden (Strauss' Salome, 1905) and St Petersburg 0(Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 1934)" -- publisher's description.
Book Synopsis Opera in the Jazz Age by : Alexandra Wilson
Download or read book Opera in the Jazz Age written by Alexandra Wilson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz, the Charleston, nightclubs, cocktails, cinema, and musical theatre: 1920s British nightlife was vibrant and exhilarating. But where did opera fit into this fashionable new entertainment world? Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular culture at a key historical moment when there was a growing imperative to categorize art forms as "highbrow," "middlebrow," or "lowbrow." Literary studies of the so-called "battle of the brows" have been numerous, but this is the first book to consider the place of opera in interwar debates about high and low culture. This study by Alexandra Wilson argues that opera was extremely difficult to pigeonhole: although some contemporary commentators believed it to be too highbrow, others thought it not highbrow enough. Opera in the Jazz Age paints a lively and engaging picture of 1920s operatic culture, and introduces a charismatic cast of early twentieth-century critics, conductors, and celebrity singers. Opera was performed during this period to socially mixed audiences in a variety of spaces beyond the conventional opera house: music halls, cinemas, cafés and schools. Performance and production standards were not always high - often quite the reverse - but opera-going was evidently great fun. Office boys whistled operatic tunes they had heard on the gramophone and there was a genuine sense that opera was for everyone. In this provocative and timely study, Wilson considers how the opera debate of the 1920s continues to shape the ways in which we discuss the art form, and draws connections between the battle of the brows and present-day discussions about elitism. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics of twentieth-century Britain and is essential reading for anybody interested in the history of opera, the battle of the brows, or simply the perennially fascinating decade that was the 1920s.
Book Synopsis A History of Opera by : Carolyn Abbate
Download or read book A History of Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Book Synopsis Coquettes, Wives, and Widows by : Marcie Ray
Download or read book Coquettes, Wives, and Widows written by Marcie Ray and published by Eastman Studies in Music. This book was released on 2020 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.
Book Synopsis The Triumph of Pleasure by : Georgia Cowart
Download or read book The Triumph of Pleasure written by Georgia Cowart and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.
Book Synopsis Waiting for Verdi by : Mary Ann Smart
Download or read book Waiting for Verdi written by Mary Ann Smart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad. While many of the accompanying stories were exaggerated, or even invented, by later generations, Verdi's operas—along with those by Rossini, Donizetti, and Mercadante—did inspire Italians to imagine Italy as an independent and unified nation. Capturing what it was like to attend the opera or to join in the music at an aristocratic salon, Waiting for Verdi shows that the moral dilemmas, emotional reactions, and journalistic polemics sparked by these performances set new horizons for what Italians could think, feel, say, and write. Among the lessons taught by this music were that rules enforced by artistic tradition could be broken, that opera could jolt spectators into intense feeling even as it educated them, and that Italy could be in the vanguard of stylistic and technical innovation rather than clinging to the glories of centuries past. More practically, theatrical performances showed audiences that political change really was possible, making the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.
Download or read book Staging Revolution written by Xing Fan and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Revolution refutes the deep-rooted notion that art overtly in the service of politics is by definition devoid of artistic merits. As a prominent component shaping the culture of the Cultural Revolution, model Beijing Opera (jingju) is the epitome of art used for political ends. Arguing against commonly accepted interpretations, Xing Fan demonstrates that in a performance of model jingju, political messages could only be realized through the most rigorously formulated artistic choices and conveyed by performers possessing exceptional techniques. Fan contextualizes model jingju at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics. Integral to jingju’s interactions with politics are the practitioners’ constant artistic experimentations to accommodate the modern stories and characters within the jingju framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty. Therefore, a thorough understanding of model jingju demands close attention to how the artists resolved actual production problems, which is a critical perspective missing in earlier studies. This book provides exactly this much-needed dimension of analysis by scrutinizing the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, and by examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes antagonistically. Such an approach necessarily places jingju artists center stage. Making use of first person accounts of the creative process, including numerous interviews conducted by the author, Fan presents a new appreciation of a lived experience that, on a harrowing journey of coping with political interference, was also filled with inspiration and excitement. “This fascinating study is ground-breaking and timely. Xing Fan masterfully demonstrates how the creative choices made by playwrights, directors, musicians, actors, and designers intersected with one another in creating an aesthetics of the model theater during the Cultural Revolution. A must-read for anyone interested in Chinese literature and drama, theater studies, and comparative literature.” —Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis “Though no longer in fashion, the model revolutionary operas of the Cultural Revolution are still occasionally performed. Xing Fan has done us a great service by analyzing them in detail and reminding us of their merits. I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging book and learned a lot from it. I recommend it strongly.” —Colin Mackerras, Griffith University
Download or read book Blackness in Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackness in Opera critically examines the intersections of race and music in the multifaceted genre of opera. A diverse cross-section of scholars places well-known operas (Porgy and Bess, Aida, Treemonisha) alongside lesser-known works such as Frederick Delius's Koanga, William Grant Still's Blue Steel, and Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! to reveal a new historical context for re-imagining race and blackness in opera. The volume brings a wide-ranging, theoretically informed, interdisciplinary approach to questions about how blackness has been represented in these operas, issues surrounding characterization of blacks, interpretation of racialized roles by blacks and whites, controversies over race in the theatre and the use of blackface, and extensions of blackness along the spectrum from grand opera to musical theatre and film. In addition to essays by scholars, the book also features reflections by renowned American tenor George Shirley. Contributors are Naomi André, Melinda Boyd, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Karen M. Bryan, Melissa J. de Graaf, Christopher R. Gauthier, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Gayle Murchison, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Eric Saylor, Sarah Schmalenberger, Ann Sears, George Shirley, and Jonathan O. Wipplinger.
Book Synopsis Opera in Postwar Venice by : Harriet Boyd-Bennett
Download or read book Opera in Postwar Venice written by Harriet Boyd-Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.
