Opera category: 14844 books

Living Opera is a fascinating collection of 20 wide-ranging interviews with the preeminent opera professionals working on and behind the stage today. Joshua Jampol invites opera-lovers to listen in as performers such as Renee Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Rolando Villazon and Placido Domingo speak in exceptionally...

From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera: ". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received....

Opera: The Basics offers an excellent introduction to four centuries of opera. Its easy to follow sections explore topics including: the origins of opera basic terminology the history of major opera genres including: serious opera, comic opera, semi-serious opera and vernacular opera. With...

Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances,...

H. L. Mencken declared that “the opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.” It was not meant as a compliment, but to William Murray, former New Yorker staff writer and aspiring opera singer, a bawdy house is an apt metaphor for the opera: a place of confusion, high and low drama,...

With its powerful combination of music and theatre, opera is one of the most complex and yet immediate of all art forms. Once opera was studied only as 'a stepchild of musicology', but in the past two decades opera studies have experienced an explosion of energy with the introduction of new approaches...

So You Want to Sing Light Opera is a concise handbook for performers, teachers, and directors who want to learn more about the delightful genre of light opera, including Viennese operetta, English comic opera, French opéra bouffe, and Spanish zarzuela. Award-winning opera director and singer Linda...

Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world’s stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust...

The History of Opera For Beginners is a humorous, little book which starts with the radical assumption that Opera is just plain old music, rather than the highbrow, inaccessible music that everyone assumes it to be. The reader will learn the difference between Italian and German Opera and why you...

The Amato Opera Company has delighted music lovers throughout the years, establishing an extraordinary artistic tradition in New York City. -- Bill Clinton The Amato Opera theatre is a truly extraordinary New York cultural institution and it is a priceless addition to our great Citys...

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array...

With nearly three thousand new entries, the revised edition of Operas in German: A Dictionary is the most current encyclopedic treatment of operas written specifically to a German text from the seventeenth century through 2016. Musicologist Margaret Ross Griffel details the operas’ composers,...

You are getting ready for a performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and you have a few questions. How many clarinets are in the orchestra? How many orchestra members appear onstage? How many different sets are there? How long does the opera typically run? What are the key arias? Are any...

Opera is often regarded as the pinnacle of high art. A "Western" genre with global reach, it is where music and drama come together in unique ways, supported by stellar singers and spectacular scenic effects. Yet it is also patently absurd -- why should anyone break into song on the dramatic stage?...