Classical Opera category: 1804 books

In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'. The operas were translated into English, fitted...

“A major contribution . . . not only to Puccini studies but also to the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera in general.” —Nineteenth-Century Music Review   In this groundbreaking survey of the fundamentals, methods, and formulas that were taught at Italian music conservatories during...

Unabridged score of composer's last opera, renowned for splendid music and glowing orchestration. Deeply personal treatment of the legend of the Holy Grail, themes of sacred and profane love, innocence and purity, remorse and sexual renunciation. Reprint of authoritative C. F. Peters edition, including list of characters and contents in both German and English.

"The making of this book was prompted by the fact that with the season 1907-08 the Metropolitan Opera House in New York completed an existence of twenty-five years. Through all this period at public representations I have occupied stall D-15 on the ground floor as reviewer of musical affairs...

Of Bach's four sons who became composers, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88) was the most prolific, the most original, and the most influential both during and after his lifetime. This is the first comprehensive study of his music, examining not only the famous keyboard sonatas and concertos but...

A riveting story of fatal attraction between a beguiling, strong-willed gypsy and a naïve but passionate soldier who falls under her spell, Georges Bizet's Carmen pulses with seduction, obsession, and deadly betrayal. It was reviled at its Paris premiere, where its realism and perceived amorality...

In this short story Sir Antonio, Music Director of The Royal Opera House, London, and of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia of Rome, opens up and tells us his personal story. His path of a life that has led him to be one of the most famous orchestra directors in the world today. His story is that...

Le nozze di Figaro is one of Mozart’s best-loved and most enduring works. The first of the three operas he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte and based on Beaumarchais’s play, it established the thirty-year-old Mozart as an opera composer of the very first rank. Its combination of wit, acute psychological...

Opera's most enduring tragic double bill of verismo masterpieces, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci share many common features, most noticeably their direct language, plot simplicity, common-folk characters, and themes of adultery, betrayal, revenge, and murder. Written within two years of each other,...

Caritas relates the 'true', yet largely undocumented story of Christine Carpenter, a 14th-century anchoress who moves towards insanity as her desire for a divine revelation continues to be unfulfilled after a period of three years locked in her cell. Although physically isolated, she is aware of the...

This volume covers opera in Italy, France, England and the Americas during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). The book is divided into four sections that are thematically, rather than geographically, conceived: Places-essays centering on contexts for operatic culture; Genres and Styles-studies...

Often considered Romania's greatest musical force and a significant mind of the 20th century, composer George Enescu (1881-1955) achieved international fame and succeeded in incorporating Romanian spirituality into worldwide culture. Masterworks of George Enescu provides a profound and very detailed...

Today Mozart's exquisite Le Nozze di Figaro delights and moves audiences everywhere, long after its 1786 birth into tumultuous times. The original Beaumarchais play raised a firestorm in France, then on the brink of revolution, with its dangerous commentary on class relations. However, Lorenzo Da...

Chopin's Polish Ballade examines the Second Ballade, Op. 38, and how that work gave voice to the Polish cultural preoccupations of the 1830s, using musical conventions from French opera and amateur piano music. This approach provides answers to several persistent questions about the work's form, programmatic content, and poetic inspiration.