Ideology In Brittens Operas

Author : J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108416365
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ideology in Britten's Operas written by J. P. E. Harper-Scott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.

Author : Nina Penner
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253052424
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater written by Nina Penner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.

Author : Peter Franklin
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040040578
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Britten Experienced written by Peter Franklin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-07 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who writes the books we read about music that excites us, and why? Is ‘classical music’ all about class? Related questions underpin this partly polemical study, written by an academic who believes that the Humanities, to be really humane, must confront their methods and aims. Two recent studies of Benjamin Britten have specifically interested the author, who was educated in a world where the composer was a living subject of criticism and praise, his works reflecting values, worries and dramas that were not just about ‘music’. Franklin’s response is to question the recent writers, proposing that, like theirs, his own story conditioned when and how he experienced Britten. This he unfolds autobiographically in and around the discussion of specific works. Recalling his encounters with the composer as a schoolboy, as a student and opera-goer, and then as a teacher, he challenges recent assertions about Britten and modernism in the period.

Author : Tsung-Han Tsai
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108952445
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book E. M. Forster and Music written by Tsung-Han Tsai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political resonances of E. M. Forster's representations of music, offering readings of canonical and overlooked works. It reveals music's crucial role in his writing and draws attention to a previously unacknowledged eclecticism and complexity in Forster's ideological outlook. Examining unobtrusive musical allusions in a variety of Forster's writings, this book demonstrates how music provided Forster with a means of reflecting on race and epistemology, material culture and colonialism, literary heritage and national character, hero-worship and war, and gender and professionalism. It unveils how Forster's musical representations are mediated through a matrix of ideas and debates of his time, such as those about evolution, empire, Britain's relationship with the Continent, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of musicology as an academic discipline.

Author : Vicki P Stroeher
Publisher : Composers in Context
ISBN 13 : 1108496695
Total Pages : 427 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Benjamin Britten in Context written by Vicki P Stroeher and published by Composers in Context. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.

Author : Jeremy Tambling
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719022388
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opera, Ideology and Film written by Jeremy Tambling and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Emily Richmond Pollock
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190063769
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opera After the Zero Hour written by Emily Richmond Pollock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany presents opera as a site for the renegotiation of tradition in a politically fraught era of rebuilding. Though the "Zero Hour" put a rhetorical caesura between National Socialism and postwar West Germany, the postwar era was characterized by significant cultural continuity with the past. With nearly all of the major opera houses destroyed and a complex relationship to the competing ethics of modernism and restoration, opera was a richly contested art form, and the genre's reputed conservatism was remarkably multi-faceted. Author Emily Richmond Pollock explores how composers developed different strategies to make new opera "new" while still deferring to historical conventions, all of which carried cultural resonances of their own. Diverse approaches to operatic tradition are exemplified through five case studies in works by Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, Carl Orff, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Werner Egk. Each opera alludes to a distinct cultural or musical past, from Greek tragedy to Dada, bel canto to Berg. Pollock's discussions of these pieces draw on source studies, close readings, unpublished correspondence, institutional history, and critical commentary to illuminate the politicized artistic environment that influenced these operas' creation and reception. The result is new insight into how the particular opposition between a conservative genre and the idea of the "Zero Hour" motivated the development of opera's social, aesthetic, and political value after World War II.

Author : Harriet Boyd-Bennett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316761762
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opera in Postwar Venice written by Harriet Boyd-Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

Author : Vicki P. Stroeher
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1783271957
Total Pages : 556 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Benjamin Britten Studies written by Vicki P. Stroeher and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together established authorities and new voices, this book takes off the 'protective arm' around Britten.

Author : Daniel Albright
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1441124071
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten written by Daniel Albright and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner and Britten to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.