Classical Opera category: 1804 books

Puccini is one of the most beloved of all opera composers La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot play to packed opera houses the world over. In his lifetime he achieved an international celebrity accorded to only a few, yet the critics were rarely impressed. He was nevertheless a creative...

This file includes (in the original German): Das Liebesverbot; Der Fliegende Holländer; Die Feen; Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg; Lohengrin Der Ring des Nibelungen" (Das Rheingold; Die Walküre; Siegfried; Götterdämmerung); Parsifal; Rienzi; Tannhäuser; Tristan und Isolde. According to Wikipedia:...

The operas of the German composer Richard Wagner had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his works. He went on to revolutionise the music form through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total...

The Hungarian composer Gysrgy Ligeti (1923-2006) was one of the most innovative and influential composers of the last 50 years. He was one of a number of Central and East European composers, including Witold Lutoslawski and Krzysztof Penderecki, who have created musical languages that combine elements...

In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses...

Have you ever been carried away by a piece of classical music? In this funny, evocative, personal eBook, previously published as ‘Music for the People: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Classical Music’, Gareth takes us on a journey of musical discovery that explains and entertains in equal measure....

“Delightfully sophisticated . . . the only music history that can be savored, muscatel in hand, in the green shade of a beach umbrella” (John Simon, The Hudson Review). R. J. Stove’s A Student’s Guide to Music History is a concise account, written for the intelligent lay reader,...

What were the “secret” techniques and musical insights that enabled performers such as Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, and Glenn Gould to achieve such unsurpassed levels of musical expression and technical skill? And, if we could rediscover this knowledge,...

Haydn, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, oh, my! The beginner's guide to classical music Classical Music For Dummies is a friendly, funny, easy-to-understand guide to composers, instruments, orchestras, concerts, recordings, and more. Classical music is widely considered one of the pinnacles of human...

Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer: For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer...

Ernst Krenek has been described as a “one-man history of twentieth-century music.” His vast compositional output encompasses many of its extremes and expresses many of its contradictions. Few have attempted, however, to contextualize Krenek’s compositional output because our understanding of...

Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera...

Titles in The Listener’s Companion: A Scarecrow Press Music Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume explains in clear and accessible language how to listen to works from particular...

Richard Wagner’s “total work of art,” the monumental, gripping, and fathomlessly deep story of the ring of the Nibelung, is here translated and narrated in a completely new fashion: breathless and distilled, it becomes the most exciting suspense novel of the opera world. The author follows the...