Opera And The Morbidity Of Music

Author : Joseph Kerman
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 9781590172650
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Opera and the Morbidity of Music written by Joseph Kerman and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of classical music, the distinguished critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman declares, is “a tired, vacuous concept that will not die.” In this wide-ranging collection of essays and reviews, Kerman examines the ongoing vitality of the classical music tradition, from the days of Guillaume Dufay, John Taverner, and William Byrd to contemporary operas by Philip Glass and John Adams. Here are enlightening investigations of the lives and works of the greatest composers: Bach and his Well-Tempered Clavier, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s piano concertos, Schubert’s songs, Wagner’s and Verdi’s operas. Kerman discusses The Magic Flute as well as productions of the Monteverdi operas in Brooklyn and the Ring in San Francisco and Bayreuth. He also includes remembrances of Maria Callas and Carlos Kleiber that make clear why they were such extraordinary musicians. Kerman argues that predictions—let alone assumptions—of the death of classical music are not a new development but part of a cultural transformation that has long been with us. Always alert to the significance of historical changes, from the invention of music notation to the advent of recording, he proposes that the place to look for renewal of the classical music tradition in America today is in opera—in a flood of new works, the rediscovery of long-forgotten ones, and innovative productions by companies large and small. Written for a general audience rather than for experts, Kerman’s essays invite readers to listen afresh and to engage with his insights into how music works. “His gift is so uncommon as to make one sad,” Alex Ross has said.

Author : Joseph Kerman
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 030783400X
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Opera As Drama written by Joseph Kerman and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.

Author : Linda Hutcheon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674038916
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Opera written by Linda Hutcheon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In "Opera: The Art of Dying" a physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art imparts. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of "contemplatio mortis"--a dramatized exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror of death (in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites"); the longing for death (in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"); preparation for the good death (in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"); and suicide (in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). In works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and even right morally, psychologically, and artistically--how, in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give life meaning.

Author : Peter Conrad
Publisher : Chatto & Windus
ISBN 13 : 9780701208400
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Song of Love and Death written by Peter Conrad and published by Chatto & Windus. This book was released on 1989 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Linda Hutcheon
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803273184
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Opera written by Linda Hutcheon and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. This is an examination of how opera uses the singing body to give voice to the suffering person. It presents medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera.

Author : Cormac Newark
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190224215
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon written by Cormac Newark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in urban planning, too this is, perhaps surprisingly, often still the case. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by tracing its evolution from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most canonic art forms still in existence. Throughout the book, a lively assembly of musicologists, historians, and industry professionals tackle key questions of opera's past, present, and future. Why did its canon evolve so differently from that of concert music? Why do its top ten titles, all more than a century old, now account for nearly a quarter of all performances worldwide? Why is this system of production becoming still more top-heavy, even while the repertory seemingly expands, notably to include early music? Topics range from the seventeenth century to the present day, from Russia to England and continental Europe to the Americas. To reflect the contested nature of many of them, each is addressed in paired chapters. These complement each other in different ways: by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting or changing contexts. Posing its questions in fresh, provocative terms, The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon challenges scholarly assumptions in music and cultural history, and reinvigorates the dialogue with an industry that is, despite everything, still growing.

Author : Nicholas Till
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521855616
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies written by Nicholas Till and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive attempt to map the current field of opera studies by leading scholars in the discipline.

Author : John Dizikes
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300061017
Total Pages : 611 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Opera in America written by John Dizikes and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text tells how opera, steeped in European aristocratic tradition, was transplanted into the democratic cultural enviroment of America. It includes vignettes of productions, personalities, audiences and theatres throughout the country from 1735 to the present day.

Author : George Putnam Upton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 728 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Standard Operas written by George Putnam Upton and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Brayton Polka
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739193163
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Modernity between Wagner and Nietzsche written by Brayton Polka and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity between Wagner and Nietzsche analyzes the operas and writings of Wagner in order to prove that the ideas on which they are based contradict and falsify the values that are fundamental to modernity. This book also analyzes the ideas that are central to the philosophy of Nietzsche, demonstrating that the values on the basis of which he breaks with Wagner and repudiates their common mentor, Schopenhauer, are those fundamental to modernity. Brayton Polka makes use of the critical distinction that Kierkegaard draws between Christianity and Christendom. Christianity represents what Nietzsche calls the faith that is presupposed in unconditionally willing the truth in saying yes to life. Christendom, in contrast, represents the bad faith of nihilism in saying no to life. Polka then shows that Wagner, in following Schopenhauer, represents Christendom with the demonstration in his operas that life is nothing but death and death is nothing but life. In other words, the purpose of the will for Wagner is to annihilate the will, since it is only in and through death that human beings are liberated from life as willfully sinful. Nietzsche, in contrast, is consistent with the biblical concept that existence is created from nothing, from nothing that is not made in the image of God, that any claim that the will can will not to will is contradictory and hence false. For not to will is, in truth, still to will nothing. There is then, Nietzsche shows, no escape from the will. Either human beings will the truth in saying yes to life as created from nothing, or in truly willing nothing, they say no to life in worshiping the God of Christendom who is dead.