The Politics of Opera in Post-War Venice

The Politics of Opera in Post-War Venice PDF Author: Harriet Boyd-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

The Politics of Opera in Post-War Venice

The Politics of Opera in Post-War Venice PDF Author: Harriet Boyd-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

Opera in Postwar Venice

Opera in Postwar Venice PDF Author: Harriet Boyd-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316761762
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These clichés are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

Feasting and Fasting in Opera

Feasting and Fasting in Opera PDF Author: Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680500X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Feasting and Fasting in Opera shows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage. In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner’s operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi’s La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti’s page-turning and imaginative book.

Opera in Seventeenth-century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-century Venice PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520068087
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 684

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Book Description
Describes how forty years of accutely conscious development by composers, librettists, singers, and others in Venice established the conventions which turned opera from a courtly entertainment into an art form found on the stages of all Europe

Music and Democracy

Music and Democracy PDF Author: Marko Kölbl
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3732856577
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Music and Democracy explores music as a resource for societal transformation processes. This book provides recent insights into how individuals and groups used and still use music to achieve social, cultural, and political participation and bring about social change. The contributors present outstanding perspectives on the topic: From the promise and myth of democratization through music technology to the use of music in imposing authoritarian, neoliberal or even fascist political ideas in the past and present up to music's impact on political systems, governmental representation, and socio-political realities. The volume further features approaches in the fields of gender, migration, disability, and digitalization.

Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama

Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama PDF Author: Louis Bayman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402879
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Inventing the Business of Opera

Inventing the Business of Opera PDF Author: Beth Glixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195342976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stages of Venice during the seventeenth century. All of the components necessary to opera production are highlighted, from the financial backing, to the libretto and the score, to the singers, dancers, the scenery, and the costumes.

Saint-Saëns and the Stage

Saint-Saëns and the Stage PDF Author: Hugh Macdonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426387
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The first major study of Saint-Saëns's stage music, timed to coincide with revivals of his operas on stage.

A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760

A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres, 1660-1760 PDF Author: Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503619975
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
From 1637 to the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was the world center for operatic activity. No exact chronology of the Venetian stage during this period has previously existed in any language. This reference work, the culmination of two decades of research throughout Europe, provides a secure ordering of 800 operas and 650 related works from the period 1660 to 1760. Derived from thousands of manuscript news-sheets and other unpublished materials, the Chronology provides a wealth of new information on about 1500 works. Each entry in this production-based survey provides not only perfunctory reference information but also a synopsis of the text, eyewitness accounts, and pointers to surviving musical scores. What emerges, in addition to secure dates, is a profusion of new information about events, personalities, patronage, and the response of opera to changing political and social dynamics. Appendixes and supplements provide basic information in Venetian history for music, drama, and theater scholars who are not specialists in Italian studies.

Fascism, the War, and Structures of Feeling in Italy, 1943-1945

Fascism, the War, and Structures of Feeling in Italy, 1943-1945 PDF Author: Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192887505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
On July 25, 1943, news of Mussolini's resignation and subsequent arrest stunned Italians leaving them dumbfounded. After two decades, fascism had fallen without any advance warning. As festive events marked the incredible outcome and reminders of the past were destroyed, an uncontainable joy seemed to pervade Italians. But what did people actually celebrate? How did they understand the bygone dictatorship, which was soon to be reincarnated in the Italian Social Republic (RSI)? Drawing on more than one hundred diaries written by ordinary citizens (and some prominent figures as well) and inspired by Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling, the book examines Italians' perspectives on fascism at a very critical moment in their history. With the country mired in a devastating war further complicated by the September 8, 1943 armistice with the Allies and subsequent German occupation--followed by the eruption of an Italian-against-Italian conflict, the switching of alliances, and the declaration of war against Germany on October 13, 1943--the fast pace of history seemed to deflect Italians' attention from their immediate past. Amidst the daily experience of bombings, hunger, displacement, and death, coming to terms with twenty years of dictatorship turned out to be an arduous enterprise. Whether those who had lived under the fascist regime wished 'not to think of it and not to speak any more about it' as philosopher Benedetto Croce maintained, it is hard to ascertain. In truth, little is known of what Italians felt and thought about fascism after its precipitous demise. This book remedies the gap in historical scholarship by assessing how Italians confronted their present and negotiated their past during the two years from the fall of the regime to the definitive defeat of the RSI and the end of the world war in May 1945. By bringing to life the cultural imaginaries and practices of the past, the book raises ostensibly intractable questions on the epochal impact of what often appears as inconsequential: the typically unseen and seemingly banal power of everyday experiences.