Michael Steen: 24 books
Puccini's Tosca
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2013
Tosca’s première in Rome in January 1900 was nearly disrupted by a terrorist threat to blow up Italy’s King Umberto. Victorien Sardou had written the melodrama for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Giacomo Puccini’s popular opera is a tale of sadism and brutality, torture, attempted rape,...
Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2012
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...
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2012
Butterfly is a delicate and impressionable geisha who thinks she has married Pinkerton, a US naval officer briefly stationed in Japan. Naive and loving as she is, she does not realise that for him the marriage is a sham, an extended 'date'. It’s not long before he goes away, leaving her pregnant....
Mozart's The Magic Flute
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2013
Even Salieri, the notorious villain of Peter Shaffer’s drama Amadeus, admired Mozart’s comic opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), which was premièred in Vienna a few weeks before Mozart’s death in December 1791. Though sometimes enjoyed as a children’s opera, this is not a pantomime:...
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
A Short Guide to a Great Opera
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2013
With the ‘Tristan chord’ at the start of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the composer launched modern music. The political refugee, a former revolutionary, was living in Zurich when the lovely Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a rich businessman, inspired him to break off from working on Siegfried,...
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...
by Michael Steen
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2015
This compendium of short guides to all twelve Puccini’s operas is part of the author’s series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Puccini’s highly-charged music provides an unforgettable experience for those enjoying it socially, in an opera-house or cinema, or at home on TV, radio etc. He has been...
by Michael F. Johnson, Lisa D. O'Steen, Dena F. Dincauze
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2009
The southeastern United States has one of the richest records of early human settlement of any area of North America. This book provides the first state-by-state summary of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research from the region, together with an appraisal of models developed to interpret the data....
Another's Country
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies
Language: English
Release Date: July 25, 2015
The 18th-century South was a true melting pot, bringing together colonists from England, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and other locations, in addition to African slaves—all of whom shared in the experiences of adapting to a new environment and interacting with American Indians. The shared...
empathy
it's what holds the world together
Language: English
Release Date: August 11, 2016
This book is a concise theoretical and practical guide on how to help people improve contact with themselves and each other. Its authors met for the first time in 2007. We represent widely divergent professions, but we share an interest in the circumstances of children with regard to the rapid changes...
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