Author: Roger ParkerPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192854452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618
Book Description
A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.
The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera
Author: Roger ParkerPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192854452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618
Book Description
A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.
The Oxford History of Opera
Author: Roger ParkerPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Eleven leading authorities chronicle the full sweep of opera, ranging from the earliest known works to such experimental efforts as Robert Wilsom and Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. In three sections on staging, singers, and the social climate, the writers give us a look behind the scenes as well as a feel for what opera was like in the past. 8 bandw plates.
The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre
Author: John Russell BrownPublisher: Oxford Illustrated History
ISBN: 9780192854421
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 598
Book Description
A scholarly look at 4,500 years of theater, beginning with its Greek origins and concluding with a study of theater since 1970.
A History of Opera
Author: Carolyn AbbatePublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 576
Book Description
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.
Opera
Author: Piero WeissPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195116380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
In Opera: A History in Documents, Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo, to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and to Bertolt Brecht's writing desk, among many other landmarks in opera's history. Weiss expertly guides students, providing highly accessible headnotes to each selection that both contextualize the excerpts and position them within the broader historical narrative. In addition, he offers original translations of more than half of the selections in the book, many of which appear here in English for the first time. Stage settings, costumes, portraits, contemporary playbills, and other illustrations enliven the text and help to recreate the feel of the era under discussion. Opera: A History in Documents is an intrinsically lively text that will enrich college courses on opera and delight any music-loving reader.
The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature
Author: Pat RogersPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192854377
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
Traces the history of English literature from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the present day.
The Oxford Handbook of Opera
Author: Helen M. GreenwaldPublisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0195335538
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1217
Book Description
Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.
The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China
Author: Jeffrey N. WasserstromPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
This lavishly illustrated volume explores the history of China during a period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations, from the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) through to the present day. The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China promises to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising superpower on the verge of what promises to be the 'Chinese century', introducing readers to important but often overlooked events in China's past, such as the bloody Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), which had a death toll far higher than the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War. It also helps readers see more familiar landmarks in Chinese history in new ways, such as the Opium War (1839-1842), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and the Tiananmen protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. This is one of the first major efforts — and in many ways the most ambitious to date — to come to terms with the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, taking readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years (the Beijing Games, the financial crisis, and China's rise to global economic pre-eminence) which have so fundamentally altered Western views of China and China's place in the world.
The Oxford Illustrated History of the World
Author: Felipe Fernández-ArmestoPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191067202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
Imagine the planet, as if from an immense distance of time and space, as a galactic observer might see it—with the kind of objectivity that we, who are enmeshed in our history, can ́t attain. The Oxford Illustrated History of the World encompasses the whole span of human history. It brings together some of the world's leading historians, under the expert guidance of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, to tell the 200,000-year story of our world, from the emergence of homo sapiens through to the twenty-first century: the environmental convulsions; the interplay of ideas (good and bad); the cultural phases and exchanges; the collisions and collaborations in politics; the successions of states and empires; the unlocking of energy; the evolutions of economies; the contacts, conflicts, and contagions that have all contributed to making the world we now inhabit.
Opera in the Jazz Age
Author: Alexandra WilsonPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190912669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
Jazz, the Charleston, nightclubs, cocktails, cinema, and musical theatre: 1920s British nightlife was vibrant and exhilarating. But where did opera fit into this fashionable new entertainment world? Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular culture at a key historical moment when there was a growing imperative to categorize art forms as "highbrow," "middlebrow," or "lowbrow." Literary studies of the so-called "battle of the brows" have been numerous, but this is the first book to consider the place of opera in interwar debates about high and low culture. This study by Alexandra Wilson argues that opera was extremely difficult to pigeonhole: although some contemporary commentators believed it to be too highbrow, others thought it not highbrow enough. Opera in the Jazz Age paints a lively and engaging picture of 1920s operatic culture, and introduces a charismatic cast of early twentieth-century critics, conductors, and celebrity singers. Opera was performed during this period to socially mixed audiences in a variety of spaces beyond the conventional opera house: music halls, cinemas, cafés and schools. Performance and production standards were not always high - often quite the reverse - but opera-going was evidently great fun. Office boys whistled operatic tunes they had heard on the gramophone and there was a genuine sense that opera was for everyone. In this provocative and timely study, Wilson considers how the opera debate of the 1920s continues to shape the ways in which we discuss the art form, and draws connections between the battle of the brows and present-day discussions about elitism. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics of twentieth-century Britain and is essential reading for anybody interested in the history of opera, the battle of the brows, or simply the perennially fascinating decade that was the 1920s.