Opera category: 14844 books
Mozart’s Don Giovanni
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2012
With a wealth of famous tunes and meticulous characterisation, Don Giovanni is an undisputed masterpiece created by Mozart out of a thread-bare fairground gig. The Don – for whom both sexes have a sneaking admiration – gatecrashes proceedings, serenading and seducing as he goes. As wily as he...
by Burton D. Fisher
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2005
A newly translated LIBRETTO with foreign language and english translation side-by-side, AND Music Highlight Examples.
Verdi's La Traviata
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2013
Verdi’s now-popular opera was a fiasco in Venice in 1853, attributable perhaps to the prima donna being noticeably obese, despite apparently wasting with tuberculosis. Soon, however, Verdi’s scandalous love story was on stage contemporaneously at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Covent Garden and Drury...
Verdi's Rigoletto
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2013
From the première of Rigoletto at Venice’s La Fenice in 1851, the Duke’s La donna è mobile caught on with the public and has done much to ensure the ongoing popularity of Verdi’s opera about the body in the sack. Rigoletto, the sarcastic court jester, is cursed by a nobleman who he has mocked....
Great Operas
A Guide to Twenty-Five of the World's Finest Musical Experiences
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2012
With four famous operas each from Mozart, Verdi and Puccini, and two each from Rossini and Donizetti, there is a feast of information. Here are short guides to The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni; to the splendour of Aïda, the heart-breaking La Traviata; the drama of Tosca. The range is very...
The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera
New Edition
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2014
This new edition of leading opera critic Rupert Christiansen's perennially popular Pocket Guide has between extensively revised, and incorporates many more operas from all periods, including recent works by Philip Glass, Mark Anthony Turnage, Thomas Adès and George Benjamin.
Whether you are...
Giacomo Puccini
A Discography
Language: English
Release Date: June 21, 2012
Opera recordings have been with us since the creation of the first wax cylinders. Now at a time when the 25-year reign of the compact disc appears to be coming to an end is the moment to take stock of the history of recordings of arguably the most popular composer of operas, Giacomo Puccini. In Giacomo...
by Hugh Macdonald
Language: English
Release Date: July 23, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: July 23, 2014
Today Georges Bizet is most immediately recognized as the composer of the acclaimed opera Carmen. One of the most frequently performed operas for over a century, Carmen explores concepts such as the femme fatale and murderous jealousy with vivacity, color, and a wealth of melody. Yet it is only one...
Wagner Without Fear
Learning to Love--and Even Enjoy--Opera's Most Demanding Genius
Language: English
Release Date: June 16, 2010
Do you cringe when your opera-loving friends start raving about the latest production of Tristan? Do you feel faint just thinking about the six-hour performance of Parsifal you were given tickets to? Does your mate accuse you of having a Tannhäuser complex? If you're baffled by the behavior of Wagner...
Molto Agitato
The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2003
If the opera world is full of “intrigue, double meanings, and devious dramatics,” then no place exemplifies this more than the world-famous Metropolitan Opera, where politics, ambition, and oversized egos have traditionally taken center stage along with some of the world’s richest music. Drawing...
The King and I
The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2004
Luciano Pavarotti’s longtime manager and friend tells all. All.
The King and I is the story of the thirty-six-year-old business relationship between Luciano Pavarotti and his manager, Herbert Breslin, during which Breslin guided what he calls, justifiably, “the greatest career in classical...
The Gilded Stage
A Social History of Opera
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2010
Fascinating and highly readable, this is the definitive social history of the world's most romantic, flamboyant, glamorous, and politically influential art-form: opera
From its beginnings in the Renaissance cities of northern Italy opera has permeated through Europe, America, and beyond, becoming...
Opera in the Age of Rousseau
Music, Confrontation, Realism
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
Historians of French politics, art, philosophy and literature have long known the tensions and fascinations of Louis XV's reign, the 1750s in particular. David Charlton's study comprehensively re-examines this period, from Rameau to Gluck and elucidates the long-term issues surrounding opera. Taking...
Technology and the Diva
Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2016
In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century...