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Italian Opera in the 18th and 19th centuries was an experience unequaled anywhere else in the world. The unique emotion, flavor, and passion that existed have yet to be attained in any other country. Opera houses in Italy are the birthplace of this great art form. They represent its beauty and richness. More than just concrete, stone, glass, and wood, they are alive, each with a character and history of its own. This work recreates the social, political, architectural, and performance histories of each house by including eyewitness accounts from Italian newspapers, journals, and books of the time. It covers more than 50 Italian opera houses and festivals, organized by their city of origin and geographic region. Each chapter is a journey back in time, beginning with the first theaters and performances in the city and concluding with an architectural description of the principal theater and a practical information guide for visitors (including hotel recommendations). The operatic activities of the main theater, including inaugurations, important performances, and world premieres, are also covered. A photospread, along with brief descriptions of opera-related sites, including the birthplaces, dwellings, and museums of Italy's greatest composers, give an even more complete portrait of the art.
Although books have been written about various opera houses throughout the world, no one work has covered more than a relatively small number of the larger, well known companies and houses, and none have made more than brief mention of the smaller houses. No book has comprehensively listed opera repertories. Little, in sum, has been written about any of the smaller companies and houses located in non-English-speaking countries. This is the most comprehensive reference book ever written on opera companies and houses in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand--over 300, from the well known to the smaller. Each entry includes a history of the opera house or company, the works (title and composer) and type of productions offered, company staff, world and country premieres, repertory, and practical information on the theater's address, nearby hotel accommodations and how to order tickets. Most entries conclude with a bibliography.
This book is the first structured and complete research work undertaken on opera theatres across the entire Middle East and North Africa. Until now, no single study has looked at every theatrical and musical institute in these countries. Many of the opera theatres that are examined here have had very little written about them at all. This work fills this void in order to provide scholars and practitioners in the sector with the first reference work on the subject that will help our understanding of the evolutionary process that has led—and continues to lead—all the countries in the MENA region to equip themselves with an opera theatre.
Renaissance Europe, with its humanistic impulse, may have brought the cathedral-building Middle Ages to an end, but it rechanneled the religious fervor of the old era into a new cult, the cult of opera, whose grandiose rites demanded theatres as monumental and as prominently placed as any cathedral ever built. In Opera Houses of the World the musicologist Thierry Beauvert narrates in text and glorious image alike, the story of those fabulous buildings - the princes of the blood or of commerce who commissioned them, the architects who designed and decorated them, the composers who wrote for them, the golden-voiced singers who performed on their stages, and even the audiences who still attend performances like worshippers in sacred temples.
While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.
This illustrated guide to 100 of the world's most important concert halls and opera houses examines their architecture and engineering and discusses their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. The descriptions and photographs will serve as a valuable guide for today's peripatetic performers and music lovers. With technical discussions relegated to appendices, the book can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in musical performance. The photographs (specially commissioned for this book) and architectural drawings (all to the same scale) together with modern acoustical data on each of the halls provide a rich and unmatched resource on the design of halls for presenting musical performances. Together with the technical appendices, the data and drawings will serve as an invaluable reference for architects and engineers involved in the design of spaces for the performance of music.
The Operatic State examines the cultural, financial, and political investments that have gone into the maintenance of opera and opera houses in Europe, the USA and Australia. It analyses opera's nearly immutable form throughout wars, revolutions, and vast social changes throughout the world. Bereson argues that by legitimising the power of the state through universally recognised ceremonial ritual, opera enjoys a privileged status across three continents, often to the detriment of popular and indigenous art forms.
“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.
Any singer longing to have a career in opera, particularly in Europe, should be familiar with the European system of classifying voices know as Fach. The Opera Singer's Career Guide: Understanding the European Fach System presents valuable information to help readers learn, understand, and use the Fach system to their professional advantage. More than just soprano, alto, tenor, or bass, students and professionals alike should know the 25 different Fach categories fully defined here, along with the examples of roles, audition arias, and European opera houses and agents provided. Based on careful research and personal experience, singer and teacher Pearl Yeadon McGinnis describes the features, characteristics, and benefits of the Fach system, including voice categorization and classification and using Fach to train the young voice. She provides practical information on maintaining a career in opera, such as the different types, procedures, and pitfalls of opera auditions; types of opera contracts and contract negotiations; and the value of networking. She explains the different styles of European opera houses and gives an example of life in a state level German opera house, including the various performance spaces, the makeup and responsibilities of an ensemble, and the jobs and functions of opera house personnel. A glossary and several appendixes supply tools for auditioning, such as newly classified roles for Children, Lyric, and Beginner singers; roles for the established Fach categories; lists of opera agents and houses in the German speaking countries; and suggested audition arias by Fach. In addition, practical details are offered about establishing and maintaining residency in Europe, obtaining permission to live and work in Europe, and helpful hints about customs and travel.
From the “master of historical narrative” (Financial Times), a dazzling, richly detailed, panoramic work—the first to document the genesis of a continent-wide European culture. The nineteenth century in Europe was a time of unprecedented artistic achievement. It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.