A Night at the Opera

Author: Sir Denis Forman
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0307807827
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 980

Book Description
“Delightful and anti-reverential”—Sunday Times (London) With an encyclopedic knowledge of opera and a delightful dash of irreverence, Sir Denis Forman throws open the world of opera—its structure, composers, conductors, and artists—in this hugely informative guide. A Night at the Opera dissects the eighty-three most popular operas recorded on compact disc, from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. For each opera, Sir Denis details the plot and cast of characters, awarding stars to parts that are “worth looking out for,” “really good,” or, occasionally, “stunning.” He goes on to tell the history of each opera and its early reception. Finally, each work is graded from alpha to gamma (although the Ring cycle gets an “X”), and Sir Denis has no qualms about voicing his opinion: the first act of Fidelio is “a bit of a mess,” while the last scene of Don Giovanni “towers above the comic finales of Figaro and Così and whether or not [it] is Mozart's greatest opera, it is certainly his most powerful finale.” The guide also presents brief biographies of the great composers, conductors, and singers. A glossary of musical terms is included, as well as Operatica, or the essential elements of opera, from the proper place and style of the audience's applause (and boos) to the use of subtitles. A Night at the Opera is for connoisseurs and neophytes alike. It will entertain and inform, delight and (perhaps) infuriate, providing a subject for lively debate and ready reference for years to come.

The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia

Author: Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108814140
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Verdi's enduring presence on the opera stages of the world and as a subject for scholarly study by researchers in various disciplines has placed him as a central figure within modern culture. The composer's undisputed popularity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, among enthusiasts and scholars alike, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia. This comprehensive resource covers all aspects of Verdi's music and his world, including the people he knew and worked with, his compositions, and their reception. Extensive appendices list all of Verdi's known works, both published and unpublished, and the characters in his operas. As a starting point for information on specific works, people, places, and concepts, the Encyclopedia reflects the very latest scholarship, presented by an international array of experts in a manner that will have a broad appeal for opera lovers, students, and scholars.

At the Opera

Author: Ann Fiery
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811827744
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
A tribute to thirty renowned operas shares the plots and theatrical backgrounds of each, in a volume that covers such productions as Figaro and Turandot.

This Day in Music

Author: Neil Cossar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783055104
Category : Rock music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Births, deaths and marriages, No1 singles, drug busts and arrests, famous gigs and awards... all these and much more appear in this fascinating 50 year almanac.Using a page for every day of the calendar year, the author records a variety of rock and pop events that took place on a given day of the month across the years.This Day in Music is fully illustrated with hundreds of pictures, cuttings and album covers, making this the must-have book for any pop music fan.

Ticket to the Opera

Author: Phil G. Goulding
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0449005666
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 721

Book Description
In Ticket to the Opera, Phil G. Goulding finally makes the magic and mystique of opera accessible to all. Here he offers a complete operatic education, including history, definitions of key musical terms, opera lore and gossip, portraits of famous singers and the roles they immortalized, as well as pithy introductions to the greatest operas of Europe and America and their composers. The book's centerpiece is what Goulding terms "the collection"--85 classics, among them Aida, The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and Madama Butterfly, that have been packing the world's opera houses for years. This entertaining, meticulously researched book also includes a fascinating chapter on American opera from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess to Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and a discussion of the gems of twentieth-century opera featuring works like Leos Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Alban Berg's Lulu, and Serge Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. Whether you're a curious neophyte, a music lover interested in branching out, or an aficionado eager to compare notes with a brilliant fellow opera buff, you'll prize Ticket to the Opera as an essential volume in your music library.

A Night in at the Opera

Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780861964666
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Offering an arresting range of accounts by specialists in music, media, and popular culture on how the popular arts have represented opera, this book raises issues about the sociology of music and its implications for television and video culture.

Animal Crackers

Author: George Simon Kaufman
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573681370
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Book Description
"A stage vehicle for the Marx Brothers. The scene is the Long Island estate of Mrs. Rittenhouse, a wealthy patroness of the arts with a marriageable daughter. Her celebrity weekend guest is the renowned Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, the African Explorer. He arrives with his secretary, Horatio Jameson, followed by pair of "musicians": Ravelli and the Professor. What follows is typical Marxian lunacy, involving a stolen painting, a surreal bridge game, a Broadway gossip columnist named Wally Winston, a financial wizard formerly known as Abie the Fish Peddler, and a climatic burlesque of Marie Antoinette and the Three Musketeers."--George S. Kaufman website.

Vocal Apparitions

Author: Michal Grover-Friedlander
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691120089
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's play The Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera, Vocal Apparitions reveals something original and important about each medium.

First Nights at the Opera

Author: Thomas Forrest Kelly
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300115260
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
A renowned music scholar narrates the social history of European opera during its golden age in the 18th and 19th centuries by taking readers behind the scenes at the premiere performances of five extraordinary and influential operas. 88 illustrations.

Sing Me a Story

Author: Jane Rosenberg
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500278734
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
An illustrated retelling of the plots of fifteen well-known operas.