Musical Theater In Eighteenth Century Parma

How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should say -- or how?

A major re-orientation in understanding opera, exploring musical comedies with spoken dialogue previously excluded from historical accounts.

A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

A bold application of the concept of canonical works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This study stems from discoveries in a trove of documents belonging to Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de Vaudâemont, who served as governor of Milan under the Spanish crown from 1698 to 1706. These documents, together with a mass of other sources - letters, diaries, treatises, libretti, scores - offer a vivid new picture of musical life in Paris and Milan as well as exchanges between France and Italy. The book is both a patronage study and an examination of the contributions by - and the difficulties facing - musicians and dancers who worked across national and cultural boundaries. Music, Dance, and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, c.1700 follows the careers of the prince and the French violinist and composer Michel Pignolet de Montâeclair. In the context of a renewed fascination with Italian music in the 1690s, Montâeclair made a name for himself in Paris as a pedagogue and composer who understood both national styles and blended them in a way that was successful on French terms. Vaudâemont hired Montâeclair to direct a French violin band and to compose dance music for a series of new operas that observers declared "the best in Italy" but are virtually unknown today. These productions involved collaborations among a mixed company of French and Italian musicians, dancers, composers, and librettists modeled on the practice of Turinese court operas. The book is an account of the contributions of these figures to the cultural life of Paris, Milan, and other northern Italian states, and to the creative mixing of musical styles, operatic conventions, and dance technique in France and Italy through the 1720s and beyond.

In recent years, interest in Rameau’s operas has grown enormously. These works are no longer regarded as peripheral by performers and audiences but are increasingly staged in the world’s major opera houses and festivals, while the production of first-rate recordings on CD and DVD continues to flourish. Such welcome developments have gone hand in hand with an upsurge in research on Rameau and his period. The present volume, devoted solely to the composer’s operas, reflects this scholarly activity. It brings together a substantial group of essays by an international team of scholars on a wide range of aspects of Rameau’s operas. The individual essays are informed by a variety of disciplines or sub-disciplines including literature, archival studies, musical analysis, gender studies, ballet and choreography, dramaturgy and staging. The contents are addressed to a wide readership, including not only scholars but also practical musicians, stage directors, dancers and choreographers.

A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

Featuring 28 music examples this book takes an innovative approach to analyzing and interpreting nineteenth-century German song, offering new perspectives on Robert Schumann's Lieder and song cycles. Robert Schumann's Lieder are among the richest and most complex songs in the repertoire and have long raised questions and stimulated discussion among scholars, performers, and listeners. Among the wide range of methodologies that have been used to understand and interpret his songs, one that has been conspicuously absent is an approach based on narratology (the theory and study of narrative texts). Proceeding from the premise that the performance of a Lied is a narrative act, in which the singer and pianist together function as a narrator, Andrew Weaver's groundbreaking study proposes a comprehensive theory of narratology for the German Romantic Lied and song cycle, using Schumann's complete song oeuvre as the test case. The theory, grounded in the work of narratologist Mieke Bal but also drawing upon recent work in literary theory and musicology, illuminates how music can open up new meanings for the poem, as well as how a narratological analysis of the poem can help us understand the music. Weaver's book offers new insights into Schumann's Lieder and the poetry he set while simultaneously proposing a methodology applicable to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of works, including not only the rich treasury of German Lieder but also potentially any genre of accompanied song in any language from the Middle Ages to the present day.