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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.
"Divas and Scholars" is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett's personal experiences of triumphant - and even failed - performances and suffused with his towering passion for music. Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favorite operas.Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between what is written and how it is interpreted by opera conductors and performers.
At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War.
The Politics of Verdi's Cantica treats a singular case study of the use of music to resist oppression, combat evil, and fight injustice. Cantica, better known as Inno delle nazioni / Hymn of the Nations, commissioned from Italy's foremost composer to represent the newly independent nation at the 1862 London International Exhibition, served as a national voice of pride and of protest for Italy across two centuries and in two very different political situations. The book unpacks, for the first time, the full history of Verdi's composition from its creation, performance, and publication in the 1860s through its appropriation as purposeful social and political commentary and its perception by American broadcast media as a 'weapon of art' in the mid twentieth century. Based on largely untapped primary archival and other documentary sources, journalistic writings, and radio and film scripts, the project discusses the changing meanings of the composition over time. It not only unravels the complex history of the work in the nineteenth century, of greater significance it offers the first fully documented study of the performances, radio broadcast, and filming of the work by the renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini during World War II. In presenting new evidence about ways in which Verdi's music was appropriated by expatriate Italians and the US government for cross-cultural propaganda in America and Italy, it addresses the intertwining of Italian and American culture with regard to art, politics, and history; and investigates the ways in which the press and broadcast media helped construct a musical weapon that traversed ethnic, aesthetic, and temporal boundaries to make a strong political statement.
This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.
One of a series examining the development of music in specific places during particular times. This volume looks at the development of music in the early Romantic era, 1789-1849, in Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, London, Italy, the USA, Moscow, St Petersburg and Latin America.
This comprehensive bibliography and research guide details all the works currently available on Vincenzo Bellini, the Italian opera composer best known for his work Norma, which is still regularly performed today at Covent Garden and by regional opera companies. 2001, the bicentennial anniversary of Bellini's death, saw several concerts and recordings of his work, raising his academic profile. This volume aims to meet the research needs of all students of Bellini in particular.
"Addresses censorship as a worldwide issue from its earliest recorded form to the modern day ; Includes unique case studies of music censorship unfamiliar to Western audiences ; Documents censorship through a necessarily intersectional lens." --Oxford University Press.