This book is in German, which may make it of limited interest to people who are not sufficiently familiar with the language.
Birgit Nilsson probably never heard of “the Protestant work ethic,” but she didn’t need to know it.
Once upon a time, there was something known as early music. This was not so much a repertoire, a musico-historical epoch, as an attitude, a counter-cultural group.
Over the past decade, there have been a plethora of works trying to identify the historical models for characters in Puccini’s famous opera Madama Butterfly.
The interpretive reception of medieval music begins, as John Haines lays forth in the present investigation, already during the latter period of the Middle Ages.
True to the title of this collection, the present volume of correspondence edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss — here translated, revised , and supplemented by Antony Beaumont — offers, to date, the most complete body of letters of Gustav Mahler to his wife Alma.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (the “New Grove”) stands as the definitive encyclopedia on music in the English language.1
Introduction: Philip Gossett is one of those rarities in academia: a scholar of the first order and a consummate teacher.
This is a very attractive book, which, in addition to the expected text, has many striking photos, a list of the operas performed in Chicago, indicating all the seasons in which each work was given, and a season by season chronology, limited to professional companies.
This is a highly impressive coffee-table table book, loaded with stunning photographs of productions, singers, composers, and even our nation’s glorious capital.
The world of J.S. Haydn is one gravely underappreciated and undervalued. He never earned the right to a 1980’s bio pic like Mozart or was appreciated and saluted in pop culture through early rock n’ roll like Beethoven.
Some twenty years ago, a leading German musicologist remarked that the music of Parsifal
It must not have been an easy life, being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Perhaps even more so after the fact when scholars began to do their research and “wanna bes” began their intimations and psychoanalyzing. In the more seventy-five years of Mozart scholarship and its coming of age, one must ask: How much more is there to learn, to research?
This new volume from Yale University Press is one of those rare and treasured phenomena in Russian music scholarship that illuminate their subject from a new angle — that of cultural history. Indeed, Boris Gasparov's expressed goal in Five Operas and a Symphony is nothing less than turning the table on poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism that have for so long ruled the field of Slavic research, and elucidating them from a musical point of view.
At a time when the press has made the public aware of the difficult circumstances that exist for the symphony orchestra in the United States, it is refreshing to find a book that demonstrates unequivocally the nature of that institution and, as a consequence, its power in culture.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a weighty play, and Verdi’s Macbeth seems to be a weighty opera: the three volumes of this edition (two of the full score, plus a smaller Critical Commentary containing the critical notes and a description of the sources) weigh 16.6 pounds. It is remarkable to think that this is the first full score of either the 1847 original or the 1865 revised Macbeth ever published.
As far back as the Middle Ages, students (often only identified as Anonymous) have recorded the methods of performance imparted by their masters. In later centuries, such illustrious teachers wrote and published their own methods.
This book examines two of the more interesting musical pieces of the Romantic movement: Romeo et Juliette (1839) and La damnation de Faust (1846). Both were composed by Hector Berlioz (1803-69), and were very much constructed in a Gesamtkunstwerk mode where literature, music, and the other arts are fused together in a hybrid style that defies genre and categorization.
This is a collection of the original libretti to Puccini's Le Villi, Edgar, Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Rondine, Il Trittico (Gianni Schicchi, Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica), and Turandot in nine booklets within a cardboard slipcase.
Throughout the history of Poland, music has been an enduring force in its culture, and Polish composers were at the forefront of a number of developments in the twentieth century.
Among the recent publications on opera, The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David Charlton, breaks new ground with its systematic and thorough exploration of grand opera, a specific part of the genre which played an important role in the musical culture of the nineteenth century.
As the editor discusses in the preface, this book concerns French opera from the 1820s and 1830s, and also its influence on works later in the century, as grand opera was adapted in other countries and inspired other composers to respond to the genre with their own works. This book is an exemplary volume which contains twenty chapters in which the contributors explore the development of grand opera, the elements essential to it, several representative works, and the influence exercised on composers like Wagner and others.
While parlance often renders grand opera as a term that could be applied to opera in general, an opera company, building, or institution, it is important to understand the origins of the musical style that had such a profound effect on the musical world. In the 1820s, as Paris became a center for opera which attracted musicians from various countries, the operas for the Parisian stage took on larger dimensions than had been previously explored in the genre. Grand opera involved librettos based on historical themes and, at times, took on elements of the French spectacle in their presentation. Likewise, the chorus became an integral part of the work, with the apposition of solo and choral textures used for dramatic effect. Ballet is also part of grand opera, and it was left to the ingenuity of the composers to find a way to include dance in the expanding artform.
Composers like Auber contributed some fine works to the stage, and the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer established a new standard for opera composition. Several articles in this book discuss the works of these composers; in fact, Meyerbeer's major operas are the subject of two articles, one by Matthias Brzoska and another by John Roberts. Halévy was another influential figure, and his works are part of various discussions, not the least of which is the article devoted to his music by Diana R. Hallman.
Grand opera was not an end in itself, and its far-reaching impact is clearly presented in this volume. With Paris as an important center for opera, composers who wished to set their mark in the genre seem obliged to succeed there. Thus, Italian composers from Donizetti to Verdi either adapted their works for the French stage or composed works for it in the style of grand opera. Beyond the conventional wisdom that has operas for Paris requiring a ballet, works that were brought to France were sometimes reconceived in terms of grand opera, and thus result in different versions of works that were already successful elsewhere. By the same token, the transition that from the Rossini to Verdi involved an awareness of grand opera, as M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet points out in her contribution to this Companion.
Even Wagner was influenced by grand opera, since a success in Paris would guarantee a composer's future. His opera Rienzi was a grand opera in five acts that played a seminal part in his development as a composer. Thomas Grey provides some insightful perspectives on this work in his extensive article about Rienzi, and also shows how the style of grand opera emerged in other works by Wagner. Grey's comments about the ultimate blurring of elements from grand opera into Wagner's later operas might be read with other operas from later in the nineteenth century in mind:
Critics have often sought to separate the modern, philosophical Wagner, as composer and dramatist, from Wagner the stage-designer, still behold to antiquated notions of Romantic stage `realism.' Yet the ways in which he remained true to the ideals of grand opera were critical to his success in capturing the imagination of audiences in his own day, and probably now, as well. (p. 342)
It is possible to read this passage with other composers in mind, including the Verdi of Don Carlos and Un ballo in maschera (a photograph from a production of that operas is part of the cover of the present book), the early Puccini of Edgar and Le villi, as well as and the Richard Strauss of Guntram and Feuersnot - not without reference, too, to the influence of Wagner. Grand opera influenced the genre in other ways, as discussed in chapters devoted to Czech and Russian works and also opera in Italy during the latter part of the nineteenth century. As Sarah Hibberd states near the end of her chapter on grand opera in Britain and the Americas, "By the end of the nineteenth century . . . it is difficult to distinguish the influence of Meyerbeer from that of later composers. . . ." (p. 422). In a sense it is impossible to escape fully the ways in which grand opera reinvigorated the stylistic choices for composers to use in opera and the aesthetics through which audiences can perceive the grandeur and scope of this dynamic artform.
The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera is an important contribution to study of opera because of the focus with which it treats a genre that is sometimes passed over. In fact, the entire book is well organized, with the individual articles are uniformly consistent and worth reading on their own. In addition to the editor's introduction, which sets the tone for the book, this Companion contains a chronology, which is useful in itself for understanding at a glance the context of the works discussed. Likewise, the bibliography of selected secondary sources provides references to important studies that readers may wish to pursue on their own. This book is essential for those interested in nineteenth-century opera - as well as the culture of the period - and those interested in this music should not miss it.
James L. Zychowicz
Madison, Wisconsin