Classical Opera category: 1804 books

As a uniquely hybrid form of artistic output, straddling music and theatre and high and popular culture, opera offers vast research possibilities not only in the field of music studies but also in the fields of media and cultural studies. Using the exotic legacy of the fin-de-siècle as its primary...

A wickedly funny look at opera today--the feuds and deals, maestros and managers, divine voices and outsized egos--and a portrait of the opera world's newest superstar at a formative point in her life and career. In Cinderella & Company, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuela Hoelterhoff takes...

"Icouldn't imagine a finer or livelier guide through the world of opera. . . . [Levine] distills a lifetime of passion and insight into this immenselyenjoyable survey, and with the right comic touch to make you wonder how operaever seemed intimidating." —Thomas May, author of Decoding...

Everything you need to know about opera in one handy guide. Part of our best-selling Pocket Guide series, The Pocket Guide to Opera contains A-Z synopses of operas and biographies of the characters, lyricists and composers. The book features the history of opera, setting it in the context of its day...

The Birth of an Opera offers illuminating insight into how operas are written and the personalities, incidents, and musical circumstances that have shaped their composition. Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists,...

The great Russian poet Pushkin’s novel in verse tells the story of Tatyana, a love-struck country girl who unwisely wrote to the arrogant city-slicker Yevgeny Onegin professing her love. The tale resonated with Tchaikovsky when he found himself callously dismissing the suit of a student who similarly...

This 2003 Companion is a fascinating and accessible exploration of the world of grand opera. Through this volume a team of scholars and writers on opera examine those important Romantic operas which embraced the Shakespearean sweep of tragedy, history, love in time of conflict, and the struggle for...

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and...

Opera can now be enjoyed not just in theatres but through live cinema screenings, on disc or streamed online. The enjoyment of opera will increase immeasurably with a good understanding of how story, character and music combine to create what is seen and heard. Refreshingly non-technical, How to Enjoy Opera reveals what makes opera so exciting and enduring.

In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later. Wilbourne...

In Staging Scenes from the Operas of Donizetti and Verdi, veteran opera director William Ferrarapresents a detailed, practical exploration of the staging of twenty-one scenes from two of opera’s most beloved composers. He brings to life Donizetti’s delightful comedies, L’Elisir d’amore and...

In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates...

Jenůfa is a harrowing tale of forbidden love, abandonment, hypocrisy, desperation, and tragic infanticide. As today’s second most frequently performed Czech opera (following Dvorák’s Rusalka), Jenůfa holds a prominent place in international opera repertoire and continues to draw the attention...

This “gem of a novel . . . gives us a glimpse not only into the Chinese opera world but deep into a woman’s heart” (Lisa See, author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane). Twenty years ago, in a fit of diva jealousy, Xiao Yanqiu, star of The Moon Opera, violently assaulted her understudy....