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The Operas Of Giacomo Meyerbeer
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Book Synopsis The Operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book The Operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: But these operas are far more than imitations: they show an apprehension of convention and genre that is nothing less than a dismantling of accepted formulas, and a highly original reconstruction of them."--Jacket.
Book Synopsis The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1791-1839 by : Giacomo Meyerbeer
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1791-1839 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris by : Mark Everist
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris written by Mark Everist and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Paris attracted foreign musicians like a magnet. The city boasted a range of theatres and of genres represented there, a wealth of libretti and source material for them, vocal, orchestral and choral resources, to say nothing of the set designs, scenery and costumes. All this contributed to an artistic environment that had musicians from Italian- and German-speaking states beating a path to the doors of the Académie Royale de Musique, Opéra-Comique, Théâtre Italien, Théâtre Royal de l'Odéon and Théâtre de la Renaissance. This book both tracks specific aspects of this culture, and examines stage music in Paris through the lens of one of its most important figures: Giacomo Meyerbeer. The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris. Meyerbeer's acculturation to Parisian theatrical mores is then examined, especially his moves from the Odéon and Opéra-Comique to the opera house where he eventually made his greatest impact - the Académie Royale de Musique; the shift from Opéra-Comique is then counterpointed by an examination of how an indigenous Parisian composer, Fromental Halévy, made exactly the same leap at more or less the same time. The book continues with the fates of other composers in Paris: Weber, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner, but concludes with the final Parisian successes that Meyerbeer lived to see - his two opéras comiques.
Book Synopsis The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1840-1849 by : Giacomo Meyerbeer
Download or read book The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1840-1849 written by Giacomo Meyerbeer and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 1999 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 2 covers the 1840s, a period designated as the Prussian Years. From 1846 Meyerbeer's journal becomes a consistent daily record, resulting in one of the most sustained depictions of a contemporary artistic, theatrical, and musical milieu ever kept by a famous composer. Illustrated.
Book Synopsis An Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Giacomo Meyerbeer: Operas, Ballets, Cantatas, Plays by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book An Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Giacomo Meyerbeer: Operas, Ballets, Cantatas, Plays written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was a great musical dramatist in his own right. The fame of his operas rests on his radical treatment of form, his development of scenic complexes and greater plasticity of structure and melody, his dynamic use of the orchestra, and close attention to all aspects of presentation and production, all of which set new standards in Romantic opera and dramaturgy. This book carries forward the process of rediscovery and reassessment of Meyerbeers art including not just his famous French operas, but also his German and Italian onesplacing them in the context of his entire dramatic oeuvre, including his ballets, oratorios, cantatas and incidental music. From Meyerbeers first stage presentation in 1810 to his great posthumous accolade in 1865, some 24 works mark the unfolding of this life lived for dramatic music. The reputation of the famous four grand operas may well live on in the public consciousness, but the other works remain largely unknown. This book provides an approachable introduction to them. The works have been divided into their generic types for quick reference and helpful association, and placed within the context of the composers life and artistic development. Each section unfolds a brief history of the works origins, an account of the plot, a critical survey of some of its musical characteristics, and a record of its performance history. Robert Letellier examines each work from a dramaturgical view point, including the essentialoften challengingphilosophical and historical elements in the scenarios, and how these concepts were translated musically onto the stage. A series of portraits and stage iconography assist in bringing the works to life.
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer was once one of the most famous of all opera composers, enjoying into the twentieth century the same universal admiration and performance as a composer like Puccini does today. Through a series of adverse factors, his reputation was seriously damaged with the resurgence of nationalism and the growing ant-Semitism in France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the propagation of a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic, the decline of the bel canto vocal tradition, and the disfavour manifested towards the heroism of French grand opera. All these factors, and especially the ban on his music in Nazi Germany, meant that Meyerbeer’s reputation was seriously overshadowed in the years after the Second World War. During the 1960s and 1970s, a tentative interest began to manifest itself, and with the advent of the new millennium, a growing rediscovery of his operas has been apparent. Not least in this process has been the recovery of all the composer’s private papers and their scholarly editing. His life and work have been the subject of a growing number of informed studies which have enabled radical reassessment. This volume takes a fresh look at this process of rediscovery by considering the composer in terms of the primary sources (diaries and letters) now available for forming a more complete and detailed biography unclouded by prejudicial or uninformed opinions. The extraordinary nature of Meyerbeer’s Jewish background and the role of this family in Prussian emancipation are also considered. Most importantly, however, his life and works are presented in a critical chronology that is fundamentally based on his own private papers, with testimony (both positive and negative) from many contemporary sources. A detailed iconography is integral to this process, and helps to bring Meyerbeer's story and music more vividly to life.
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 . This book was released on 1999 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family by : Elaine Thornton
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer and His Family written by Elaine Thornton and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-21 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-nineteenth century Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The first Jewish composer to achieve international fame, he staged his grand operas in France. His second work, Les Huguenots, became the first opera to reach 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra. He was born in Berlin in 1791 as Meyer Beer, the eldest son of Jacob and Amalia Beer. As European Jews emerged from the ghetto, his wealthy parents took a leading role in creating a more integrated Jewish identity. Jacob became a pioneer of Reform Judaism, while Amalia held a glittering musical salon. His brother Wilhelm built an observatory, where he and his scientific partner, Johann Mädler, made the first accurate maps of the moon and Mars. A milestone in the history of astronomy. Later Wilhelm became a railway entrepreneur, a banker and a politician. The youngest son Michael was a dramatist and poet who died at the age of 33. His third play was admired by Goethe, who staged it at Weimar. This biography reveals the story of a remarkable family who fought prejudice and intolerance to become role models for their contemporaries, and whose lives illuminate a crucial and formative period in German-Jewish history
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 222 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.
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Deliberately Forgotten Composer by : David Faiman
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Deliberately Forgotten Composer written by David Faiman and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Complete Libretti of Giacomo Meyerbeer, in the Original and in Translation, in Five Volumes, The by : Richard Arsenty
Download or read book Complete Libretti of Giacomo Meyerbeer, in the Original and in Translation, in Five Volumes, The written by Richard Arsenty and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 2893 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.
Book Synopsis The Meyerbeer Libretti by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book The Meyerbeer Libretti written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 353 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.
Book Synopsis Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 29 February 1836, Les Huguenots, a grand opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), with words by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and Émile Deschamps (1791–1871), was performed for the first time, at the Paris Opéra. It was to be one of the most successful productions ever staged at the Opéra, with 1,126 performances in Paris over the next hundred years, and, in the process, breaking all box office records. It became Meyerbeer’s most popular work, with thousands of stagings throughout the world. Les Huguenots is a huge exploration of faith, tolerance, hatred, extermination, love, loyalty, self-sacrifice and hope in despair. It is the first panel in a central diptych on the Reformation, at the heart of the wider tetralogy of Meyerbeer’s grand operas, where issues of power, religion and love are examined in a variety of modes. For five years after the sensational premiere of Robert le Diable, Meyerbeer worked on this gigantic drama, partly adapted by Scribe from Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique de Charles IX. Meyerbeer matches the text in drama, splendour and ceremony: it combines theatricalism with profound depths of feeling. Its gorgeous colouring, intense passion, consistency of dramatic treatment, and careful delineation of character secured for this work vast fame and influence. It was an epoch-making opera, an enduring monument to Meyerbeer’s fame. The music for this sombre tapestry of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre springs from the core of the vivid action, and creates a panoramic alternation of moods, that capture the tragedy of religious intolerance and personal anguish in one of the most fraught events in history, when some 30,000 French Protestants were murdered during 24 August 1574. Meyerbeer’s music rises to the occasion, and reaches sublime heights of music drama, especially in the fourth and fifth acts, with the Blessing of the Daggers (one of the most electric scenes in all opera), the more powerful Love Duet, and the Trio of Martyrdom in the last moments of the opera. Spectacle was incorporated in the plot, in Meyerbeer’s concern to conjure up the couleur locale of those heroic times. In spite of the overwhelming dramatic power and the instrumental riches of the score, the most significant aspect of the work came to be regarded as the supremacy of the seven principal vocal parts. Performances of Les Huguenots at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the 1890s were among the most famous in operatic history.
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ARSC Awards for Excellence, 2014: Best Historical Research in Classical Music (Certificate of Merit). This book presents a discography of recordings made from the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) – from the inception of recording techniques in 1889 until the dominance of the long-playing record in 1955. It is a testimony to the once-universal fame of the composer and the esteem in which in his works were held. During that period some nearly 2000 artists (at least 1065 of them singers) recorded arias and ensembles from all six of the French operas of Meyerbeer's maturity (Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, L'Étoile du Nord, Dinorah, L'Africaine), as well as selections from other works, orchestral pieces, and a variety of arrangements for band and other instruments. Covering more than 150 different pieces, the whole of this recorded legacy makes Meyerbeer one of the most popular classical composers of any age. Many of the legendary names of this Golden Age of Song were devoted to Meyerbeer's compositions (like Aumonier, Amato, Gilion, Rethberg, Lazzari, Barrientos, Delmas, Slezak, Belhomme, Branzell, Lehmann, Hempel, Escalais, Ancona, De Lucia, De Angelis, De Cisneros, Tamagno, Rothier, Pertile, Ruffo, Siems, Kurz, Caruso, Chaliapin). This discography is integral to the history of opera, the nature of lyric recording, and the story of song and vocal technique. It is divided into chapters listing the works recorded, the singers, orchestras, bands and other musicians who recorded pieces from the operas (with details of the labels, places, dates, matrix and record numbers), as well as providing anthologies of modern transfers of the some of the old 78 records to modern media (LP, CD, MP3), and also listing a bibliography devoted to vintage records and singers from the early days of recording.
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer by : Marco Clemente Pellegrini
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Marco Clemente Pellegrini and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide has resulted from years of research on the papers and music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and aims to provide a bibliographical aid and point of reference for further research. The first part presents the private papers connected to the composer and his principal librettist, Eugène Scribe—both archival and printed, with working papers and correspondence, as found in Berlin, Paris and some of the famous libraries of the world. The body of Part 2 draws together all the known resources on Meyerbeer's life and historical reputation—from full scale biographies and entries in reference books, through critical discussions to website resources to records of symposia. The third part provides material about his background with its unique mixture of Jewish and Prussian elements, the powerful role of the city of Berlin in his life and work. The fourth part lists bibliographic material for Meyerbeer's music, looking at his operas, grouped as German, Italian and French, with each individual entry providing a record of the scores available, both modern and historical, the various arrangements made from the operas during the heyday of their popularity, reviews of modern performances, discography, and bibliography of studies and publications pertinent to the wider cultural and historical contexts of the works. The next two sections constitute an extended record of material pertinent to the contemporaries of Meyerbeer. In the fifth section are select bibliographies of composers, authors, artists, performers, politicians, those who played some part in the composer's life, or anyone of significance in his wider contemporary circumstances. This is continued in the sixth part where the cultural and aesthetic elements of the composer's milieu, or life in the theatre during seventy years of the nineteenth century, are listed. The seventh part adds a bibliography of social and historical background, where the incidental issues of Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe, and the wider political, historical and geographical circumstances of Meyerbeer's life, his relentless travelling, and closely recorded experiences in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, England, and Austria. The eighth section provides a thematic key to this extensive material. Part 9 provides an extended tripartite series of lists of the published scores, arrangements and some special studies of Meyerbeer over the period 1820 to 2005—in alphabetical, chronological and thematic ordering. The last two sections furnish the modern equivalent of this record of Meyerbeer and his compositions, showing in Part 11 the list of performances of his operas since the Second World War, and in Part 12, listing the recordings of the operas, both commercial and private, for the same period. The thirteenth and last section is iconographical, pictures that represent an interesting survey of the popular response to Meyerbeer in the 19th century.
Book Synopsis The Meyerbeer Libretti by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book The Meyerbeer Libretti written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 287 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.
Book Synopsis Giacomo Meyerbeer by : Robert Ignatius Letellier
Download or read book Giacomo Meyerbeer written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giacomo Meyerbeer remains an enigma. Until the First World War he was one of the most famous of all composers. this Reader hopes to reflect something of the immense fame, prestige and love in which this composer was once held, the voices of doubt and dismissal that began to be heard even in his lifetime, and the enduring witness to his fame and worth evinced by those who have continued to believe in him in the face of the encroaching collective disparagement. Since the centenary of his death in 1964, there has been growing rediscovery of his life and re-evaluation of his art. While the revival of his work is not universal, at least a slow but steady process of recovery and exploration has begun.The forty contributions chosen for this Reader follow a chronological course, from the days of Meyerbeer's international acclaim after the premieres of his first two French operas, through the critical discussion of his art that began to take place during the mid-years of the nineteenth century, to the growing hostility induced by the advent of Wagner and his ideological following. The line of enquiry then leads into the dark days after the First World War when critical hostility was at its peak, on to the more reflective mood emerging during the 1950s, to the period of reassessment heralded by the centenary of his death in 1964. Finally, it surveys the critical rediscovery that was initiated by the bicentenary of his birth in 1991, a process that is still developing apace.The Reader also presents a series of portraits of the composer, and some images from his operas, an icongraphical commentary running parallel to the texts.
