Bel Canto Bully

Author : Philip Eisenbeiss
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1908323302
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bel Canto Bully written by Philip Eisenbeiss and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the "Viceroy of Naples", Barbaja managed both the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and La Scala in Milan. He was the influential force behind the careers of a plethora of artists including Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini and the great mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran, who became Barbaja's lover before eventually deserting him to marry Rossini. Most vitally, Barbaja's vision had an irrevocable impact on the history of Italian opera; determined to create a lucrative business, he cultivated an energetic environment of new artists producing innovative, exciting opera that people would flock to hear. Philip Eisenbeiss brilliantly pieces together the forgotten story of a tireless tyrant who began life as a barely educated coffee waiter, yet grew to be one of the richest and most potent men in Italy. A natural entrepreneur, Barbaja had the ability to predict a sensation; a skill he exploited his entire life, forging his fortune as a café-owner, arms profiteer, gambling tycoon and eventually, opera magnate. Eisenbeiss unlocks the enigma of this eccentric and fascinating personality that has been hitherto neglected.

Author : Axel Körner
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108843867
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective written by Axel Körner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.

Author : Dan H. Marek
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442235896
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Alto written by Dan H. Marek and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone is familiar with the words diva or prima donna, which have come to mean a (usually) outrageous operatic soprano, but there was a time when the star of the show was more often a contralto, or a soprano singing in today's mezzo-soprano range. This performer was referred to as an alto. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the male and female leading roles were likely to be sung by emasculated males, the alto castrati, although there were many great female altos during this period as well. The music for these fantastic artists, written by such composers as Porpora, Vinci, Hasse, and even Handel, has been largely forgotten. At the beginning of the 19th century, as the castrati died out, their roles were often assumed by female altos referred to as musici. New repertoire continued to be written for them by Rossini and others, but gradually, this musical tradition and technique was lost. Now, however, because of the talent and industry of such gifted artists as Marilyn Horne, Cecilia Bartoli, and Joyce DiDonato, and the sudden ease with which the performance of these forgotten works can be obtained, there is a resurgence of interest in the performance and preservation of this lost art. Alto: The Voice of Bel Canto examines the careers of nearly 320 great alto singers, including the great castrati, from the dawn of opera in 1597 to the present. The music of the composers who wrote for the alto voice is discussed along with musical examples and suggestions for listening. The exploration of the greatest altos’ careers and techniques offers inspiration for aspiring young singers as well as absorbing reading for the music lover who wants to know more about the fascinating world of opera.

Author : Thomas Baumert
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031432266
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Music, Money and Markets written by Thomas Baumert and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that Bach invested in mines? That Rossini improved his income by running casinos in the opera houses which on weekends performed his operas? Or that Puccini composed shorter arias to make them fit the length of gramophone disks as they reported him huge revenues? Or who was, in financial terms, the most successful classical composer in history? This book —the first of its kind— studies and compares the finances of twenty classical composers in their historical and economical context. Each chapter details and quantifies the sources of income of these musicians (wages, royalties, subsidies, percentages over the number of performances, arrangements, investments in the musical sector, etc), thus allowing to estimate the income they obtained due to their artistic — primarily compositional, but also related— activities. In addition, it also estimates the composer’s expenditures, thus drawing a relatively complete image of their personal finances. This not only allows to conclude to create a ranking of composers according to their economic success, but —more importantly— for the first time gives an accurate image of the financial situation of a broad set of composers. This allows to correct many false believes while also giving new insights on the relation between economics and music history.

Author : Dan H. Marek
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 0810886685
Total Pages : 439 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors written by Dan H. Marek and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794-1854) was a legendary tenor and the first 19th-century non-castrati male singer to become an international star of opera. The previous two centuries had been the era of the castrati, with tenors and basses relegated to character and supporting roles in the operas of their time. Rubini stood apart because he not only matched the castrati in coloratura and pathos, but he also had an extraordinarily high voice. With Rubini’s rise, and in his wake, several tenors came to sing roles written specifically for them by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and many other lesser-known bel canto composers. Signaling the end of the dominance of castrati on stage, this period would last some 40 years until the advent of Grand Opera, Wagner, and Verdi and the appearance of the first so-called High C from the chest by Gilbert-Louis Duprez in 1837. Since then, the accepted tenor sound has followed the tradition epitomized by Enrico Caruso and, in our own era, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Many composers, conductor, and performers would come to regard bel canto dramatic operas as decorative and vapid until Maria Callas and Tulio Serafin demonstrated the heights this genre of opera could reach. However, opera directors and opera performers of late who have expressed an interest in reviving selected masterpieces from the bel canto tradition have found themselves confronted with the problem of locating tenors versed in the vocal techniques necessary to carry the high tessituras. In Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors: History and Technique, Dan H. Marek explores the extraordinary life of Rubini in order to frame this special period in the history of opera and connect the technique of the castrati who were among Rubini’s instructors. Drawing on the work of Berton Coffin, Marek offers long-sought answers to the challenges presented by high tessitura of bel canto operas for tenors. To further assist working singers, Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors includes over 60 pages of exercises written by Rubini himself before 1840, which Marek, for the first time ever has adapted to acoustical phonetics. Professional singers, teachers and their students, vocal coaches, and opera conductors will find this work indispensable as the only English-language work on high tessitura for tenor and soprano singing.

Author : Pasquale Scialò
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498523072
Total Pages : 158 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Neapolitan Canzone in the Early Nineteenth Century as Cultivated in the Passatempi musicali of Guillaume Cottrau written by Pasquale Scialò and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines the history of the Canzona Napoletana and its emergence as a leading genre of popular music in the early nineteenth century. Featuring original research by leading scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and theater, this is the first collection of essays in the English language to address the topic.

Author : Orlando Figes
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1627792155
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Europeans written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the “master of historical narrative” (Financial Times), a dazzling, richly detailed, panoramic work—the first to document the genesis of a continent-wide European culture. The nineteenth century in Europe was a time of unprecedented artistic achievement. It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.

Author : Dan H. Marek
Publisher : Gatekeeper Press
ISBN 13 : 1662915535
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Divine Claudia written by Dan H. Marek and published by Gatekeeper Press. This book was released on 2021-12-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Muzio was a case apart: you cannot classify her, for in the end you have been so emotionally destroyed by her performance, you did not even know anymore what kind of instrument she had”. So spoke Lucrezia Bori, the beloved soprano of the Metropolitan Opera. Bori was echoing the opinion of many of Claudia Muzio’s contemporaries and successors such as Eva Turner, Rosa Ponselle, and Mafalda Favero who wrote:“Actually,” she [Favero] admitted with her total candor, “it took me a long time to find my own interpretation [La traviata], for I was haunted by Claudia Muzio in this role. When she sang it at the Colon in Buenos Aires in 1933, I went to each rehearsal, worshiping her, and it took a superhuman effort for me to finally obtain my personal approach. … I recall a performance of Muzio’s in Refice’s Cecilia, an opera she created in Rome in 1934 which deals with the saint’s martyrdom. She was so sublime in it that I went backstage to express my admiration at the end and impulsively dropped to my knees. ‘Now, really, my child!’ she said with those sad eyes which haunted me. ‘What are you doing?’ Her Norma was also an unforgettable creation. She had the quality I consider so essential in an artist: to make the public suffer along with her.” Sometimes we hear artists described as “She was born a hundred years too late”, but Claudia Muzio was born too soon. She was a great “singing actress” whose stage portrayals produced the hysterical kinds of responses cited above. Most reviews mention her stage work first, not failing to praise her singing. It is from her late recordings from 1934-35, when she was ill, that she is remembered today. Muzio had a distinctive vocal timbre, and an unparalleled command of dynamics and phrasing that, once heard, is never forgotten. Indeed, she was called “La Unica” in South America where she was the Teatro Colón’s brightest star for fifteen years. Muzio made her debut as the first Italian Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in 1916 at the age of 26 with Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. She went on to sing with all the great artists of her time in a world-wide career of over twenty-five-years. Claudia Muzio sang over a thousand performances of major dramatic operatic repertory, including 131 Aidas, 146 Traviatas, 81 Trovatores, and 129 Toscas. This figure does not include concerts and by all accounts, Claudia Muzio was also a great recitalist.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opera written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Eugenio Barba
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004392939
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Five Continents of Theatre written by Eugenio Barba and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Five Continents of Theatre undertakes the exploration of the material culture of the actor, which involves the actors’ pragmatic relations and technical functionality, their behaviour, the norms and conventions that interact with those of the audience and the society in which actors and spectators equally take part.