The Castrato And His Wife

Author : Helen Berry
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191620181
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato and His Wife written by Helen Berry and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. In collaboration with the English composer Thomas Arne, he popularized Italian opera, translating it for English audiences and making it accessible with his own compositions which he performed in London's pleasure gardens. Mozart and J. C. Bach both composed for him. He was a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato. Women flocked to his concerts and found him irresistible. His singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, a teenage girl from a genteel Irish family, eloped with him. There was a huge scandal; her father persecuted them mercilessly. Tenducci's wife joined him at his concerts, achieving a status as a performer she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage; whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.

Author : Alanna Skuse
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108843611
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England written by Alanna Skuse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.

Author : Anne Rice
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0345396936
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Author : Martha Feldman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520292448
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato written by Martha Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

Author : Helen Berry
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198758480
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Orphans of Empire written by Helen Berry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of what happened to the orphaned and abandoned children of the London Foundling Hospital, and the consequences of Georgian philanthropy. From serving Britain's growing global empire in the Royal Navy, to the suffering of child workers in the Industrial Revolution, the Foundling Hospital was no simple act of charity

Author : Dieter Schlesak
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 9781429958929
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Druggist of Auschwitz written by Dieter Schlesak and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dieter Schlesak's haunting novel The Druggist of Auschwitz—beautifully translated from the German by John Hargraves—is a frighteningly vivid portrayal of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of criminal and victim alike. Adam, known as "the last Jew of Schäßburg," recounts with disturbing clarity his imprisonment at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Through Adam's fictional narrative and excerpts of actual testimony from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963–65, we come to learn of the true-life story of Dr. Victor Capesius, who, despite strong friendships with Jews before the war, quickly aided in and profited from their tragedy once the Nazis came to power. Interspersed with historical research and the author's face-to-face interviews with survivors, the novel follows Capesius from his assignment as the "sorter" of new arrivals at Auschwitz—deciding who will go directly to the gas chamber and who will be used for labor—through his life of lavish wealth after the war to his arrest and eventual trial. Schlesak's seamless incorporation of factual data and testimony—woven into Adam's dreamlike remembrance of a world turned upside down—makes The Druggist of Auschwitz a vital and unique addition to our understanding of the Holocaust.

Author : Alessandro Scarlatti
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674640337
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gli equivoci nel sembiante written by Alessandro Scarlatti and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera in three acts.

Author : Elizabeth Eger
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521768802
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bluestockings Displayed written by Elizabeth Eger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first academic and interdisciplinary volume exploring bluestocking portraiture, performance and patronage in eighteenth-century Britain, opening vistas for future scholarship.

Author : Eno Koço
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527571890
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Albanian Identity in History and Traditional Performance written by Eno Koço and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a group of individual musical essays collected under common Albanian themes, with a particular focus on historical identities and traditional musical performance. It shows that, at the beginning of the 18th century, there was a growing interest in representing the Albanian hero Scanderbeg on the operatic stage, as some well-known composers of baroque music began to place a greater emphasis on music’s dramatic power to elicit emotional response. The book also notes that this sense of drama was also incorporated into the vocal forms such as opera.

Author : Brad Evans
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1783602406
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Histories of Violence written by Brad Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.