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Designed as a resource for opera lovers, opera professionals, and music students, this book provides a guide to Saint-Saens's twelve operas and a variety of other stage works for those who are curious to know more. It will enhance listeners' experience of recordings of Saint-Saens, which are enjoying increased popularity as his centenary approaches.

Boyd-Bennett investigates the relationship of music and politics in the aftermath of war and dictatorship. Bringing locality into the study of twentieth-century music by focussing on the Italian and Venetian contexts, she shows how music culture was deeply imbedded in the most pressing social and cultural concerns of the post-war period.

This new approach to the operas of Handel examines the vital and intertwined roles of singers, audiences and local cultural context in creating eighteenth-century opera. It emphasises cultural context and aspects of performance, offering a range of interpretative tools not previously exploited in studies of the century's opera before Mozart.

In this book, Rebecca Harris-Warrick dismantles the prevailing notion that dance in French Baroque opera was merely decorative, and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement is essential to understanding the work. Evolving practices in music, librettos, choreography and staging are brought to bear on sixty years of operatic history.

In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses. This is the first comprehensive study of these adaptations. Christina Fuhrmann reveals how integral these operas are to our understanding of early nineteenth-century theatre, opera and canon formation.

Karen Henson uses four detailed case studies to explore a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and to challenge the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer.

Richard Strauss' fifteen operas make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. In the first book to discuss all of Strauss' operas, Bryan Gilliam explores the composer's response to Wagner in his discussion of Strauss's stage works and their historical contexts.

Alessandra Campana examines four late nineteenth-century operas, Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito, Simon Boccanegra by Verdi, Otello by Verdi and Manon Lescaut by Puccini, and a silent film scored by Mascagni, to explore for the first time how opera participated in the making of a modern public in post-unification Italy.

How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on European cultural reception of American social identity, shedding new light on familiar works by Mozart and Haydn as well as on lesser-known operas, representing groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.

Castelvecchi's book is an in-depth study of the relationship between opera and two major phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe - the cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama - and offers a critical re-evaluation of the operatic genre system in the age of Mozart.

David Charlton's book provides the first detailed account of opera in the society of Louis XV, from Rameau to Gluck. Offering many new perspectives on opera's development and Rousseau's contributions to it, the book will be essential to those with interests in music, theatre, literature and pre-Revolution culture.

Verdi's operas portray a striking diversity of female protagonists, including warrior women, courtesans, gypsies and feisty townswomen. Contextualising these characters within the social, cultural and political history of their period, Susan Rutherford examines the shifting and complex relationships between them and their female spectators in nineteenth-century Italy.

Emanuele Senici offers a new and unusual look at Italian opera in the nineteenth century, focusing on operas which present Alpine virgins as the female protagonist. The book explores the connection between landscape and gender in opera, from Bellini's La sonnambula (1831) to Puccini's La fanciulla del West (1910).

Thomas considers the use of operatic spectacle and music by Louis XIV as a vehicle for absolutism; the resistance of music to the aesthetic and political agendas of the time; and the long-term development of opera in eighteenth-century humanist culture, examining key works by Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, among others.

The final years of the Habsburg Empire were accompanied by a new musical genre, Viennese operetta, and no composer was better suited than Johann Strauss to express his city's pride and anxiety during the period. Camille Crittenden provides an overview of Viennese operetta and examines Strauss's role as national icon.

Examining both famous and unknown artists, this book offers a reappraisal of the female operatic singer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house.

Best known for light-hearted works such as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious works after moving to Paris in 1924. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book portrays a composer whose powerful music resonated with the experience of contemporary life.

This 2004 book is a full-length, scholarly study of what is widely regarded as Mozart's most enigmatic opera and Lorenzo Da Ponte's most erudite text. Goehring's study shows how Cosi affirms comedy's regenerative powers and its capacity to grant access to modes of sympathy and understanding that are otherwise inaccessible.

This is a comprehensive critical study of the nineteenth-century French grand opera La Juive, by Halevy. Hallman explores the politically charged messages of the opera within the context of French social history and addresses the opera's portrayal of religious intolerance and antisemitic attitudes towards Jews in French society.

German opera from its primitive origins up to Wagner is the subject of this wide-ranging history. The many operas studied are placed in their historical, social and theatrical context, and attention is paid to the literary, artistic and philosophical ideas that made them part of the country's intellectual history.

This book explores the cultural life of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London. Through primary sources, many analysed for the first time, Ian Woodfield examines such issues as finances, recruitment policy, handling of singers and composers, links with Paris and Italy, and the role of women in opera management.

How did Paris and its musical landscape influence Verdi's La traviata? In this book, Emilio Sala re-examines La traviata in the cultural context of the French capital in the mid-nineteenth century. Verdi arrived in Paris in 1847 and stayed for almost two years: there, he began his relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi and assiduously attended performances at the popular theatres, whose plays made frequent use of incidental music to intensify emotion and render certain dramatic moments memorable to the audience. It is in one of these popular theatres that Verdi probably witnessed one of the first performances of Dumas fils' La Dame aux camelias, which became hugely successful in 1852. Making use of primary source material, including unpublished musical works, journal articles and rare documents and images, Sala's close examination of the incidental music of La Dame aux camelias - and its musical context - offers an invaluable interpretation of La traviata's modernity.

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 of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Ceremonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

A detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions that were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

Focusing on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the twenty-first-century digital age, this book considers how the 'diva's' voice and allure have been created by technologies and media such as theatrical stagecraft, journalism, and the simulcast.

This book explores the profession of singing, operatic culture and the representation of female performers on the French stage between 1830 and 1848 to reveal new perspectives on their social status. The book will appeal to scholars of opera, French studies, theatre history, and women's and gender studies.

Focusing on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the twenty-first-century digital age, this book considers how the 'diva's' voice and allure have been created by technologies and media such as theatrical stagecraft, journalism, and the simulcast.

Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas pere, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verne, Leroux and Proust, among many other French novelists, all wrote fiction set partly at the opera. Cormac Newark examines the development of this tradition in a rich study that will appeal to scholars of music, literature and cultural history alike.

Situating opera within social, historical and aesthetic contexts, this study focuses on the experience of audiences and individuals over time. Lindenberger uses insights from diverse areas such as recent neuroscience and social thought to rethink the nature of opera, exemplifying opera studies as an emerging field of interdisciplinary study.

Wagner's Ring cycle, argues Foster, follows an evolutionary model of Greek poetry and politics adapted from Hegel. Providing a thorough analysis of three of the most important poetic genres - epic, lyric, and drama - this book interrogates the ways in which Wagner uses Greek aesthetics to further his own ideological goals.