Classical Opera category: 1804 books

John Adams's opera, Nixon in China, is one of the most frequently performed operas in the contemporary literature. Timothy A. Johnson illuminates the opera and enhances listeners' and scholars' appreciation for this landmark work. This music-analytical guide presents a detailed, in-depth analysis...

The Metropolitan Opera on Record: A Discography of the Commercial Recordings is a comprehensive listing of all the commercial sound recordings involving the Chorus and Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's leading musical organizations. Over 900 recording sessions are listed chronologically,...

In Robert Ward's The Crucible*: Creating an American Musical Nationalism*, Robert Paul Kolt explores the life of the American composer Robert Ward through an examination of his most popular and enduring work, The Crucible. Focusing on the musical-linguistic relationships within the opera, Kolt demonstrates...

Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688–89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which...

Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of...

This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male ’beggar’s song’ of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and...

In Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now, George W. Martin surveys the role of concert bands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in making contemporary opera popular. He also chronicles how in part they lost their audience in the second half of the twentieth century by abandoning operatic...

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....

Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Europe and America since its debut in 1904. It has also inspired a global-level debate about whether the tragic heroine of the opera, Cho-Cho-san, was based on a real-life model.  Starcrossed looks at this controversy...

English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century....

The Classic FM Concise Hall of Fame celebrates classical music's unique ability to stir the emotions of a listener—whether it's the haunting melodies of Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs or Purcell's Dido and Aeneas; the passionately charged opening bars of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; dramatic...

No matter how much you think you know about classical music, you’ll find plenty of baffling questions and surprising answers inside — all carefully compiled by Richard Baker OBE. Challenge your friends! Try to answer questions round by round…or read it just for fun! You’ll have hours of enjoyment with the ultimate Classical Music questions and answers book.

An absorbing memoir by an eminent broadcaster and classical music critic, full of anecdotes about nearly every major figure in the classical music world over the last 60 years From Leonard Bernstein to Benjamin Britten, André Previn, and Igor Stravinsky, Edward Greenfield had the privilege...

Have you ever wondered… • How the orchestra got its name? • Who wrote the longest-ever symphony? • Just how do we know when to clap – and when not to? From Bach to Beethoven, Vivaldi to Vaughan Williams, the world of classical music has something to enchant every...