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The Operatic State examines the cultural, financial, and political investments that have gone into the maintenance of opera and opera houses in Europe, the USA and Australia. It analyses opera's nearly immutable form throughout wars, revolutions, and vast social changes throughout the world ...

The Operatic State examines the cultural, financial, and political investments that have gone into the maintenance of opera and opera houses in Europe, the USA and Australia. It analyses opera's nearly immutable form throughout wars, revolutions, and vast social changes throughout the world. Bereson argues that by legitimising the power of the state through universally recognised ceremonial ritual, opera enjoys a privileged status across three continents, often to the detriment of popular and indigenous art forms.

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic ...

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions.Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses Cos" fan tutte as a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna provides a valuable context for Mozart's career as an opera composer in Vienna by investigating the operation of the court theatre under Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II. The author brings together a large number of hitherto unavailable archival ...

The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna provides a valuable context for Mozart's career as an opera composer in Vienna by investigating the operation of the court theatre under Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II. The author brings together a large number of hitherto unavailable archival sources, namely the diary of Count Karl Zinzendorf (from which transcriptions have been made of all passages that address the music and theatre in Vienna from Easter 1783 to Easter 1792); theatre account books (with transcriptions of payment records for all the salaried performing personnel as well as the semi-annual lists of subscribers to the boxes in the theatre); and the theatre posters, almanacs, newspapers, and records kept by the theatre administration, which have been compiled by the author into a performance calendar. The final section of the book rounds out the picture of Josephinian theatre with a discussion of the theatre's management and an analysis of the attendance figures.

For more than sixty-five years, the weekly Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera have brought performances from one of the world's great opera companies to millions of listeners. Covering the period from the beginning of the Rudolf Bing era to the destruction of the old Met in ...

For more than sixty-five years, the weekly Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera have brought performances from one of the world's great opera companies to millions of listeners. Covering the period from the beginning of the Rudolf Bing era to the destruction of the old Met in 1966, the new volume surveys two hundred broadcasts featuring luminaries inherited from the Johnson regime (Flagstad, Milanov, Albanese, Steber, Stevens, Bjorling, Di Stefano, Tucker, Warren) and Bing recruits (De Los Angeles, Della Casa, Tebaldi, Nilsson, Price, Sutherland, Crespin, Siepi, Bergonzi, Vickers, Corelli), under the leadership of such great conductors as Fritz Reiner, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Georg Solti. As in Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931-1950, the author uses unpublished documents and letters from the Metropolitan Opera Archives to tell behind-the-scenes stories of the players involved.

Already a critically acclaimed bestseller in Germany and in Austria, Hitler's Vienna explores the critical, formative years which Hitler spent in Vienna, painting a fascinating portrait of the development of his ideas and career against the social, cultural, and political climate of the capitol of ...

Already a critically acclaimed bestseller in Germany and in Austria, Hitler's Vienna explores the critical, formative years which Hitler spent in Vienna, painting a fascinating portrait of the development of his ideas and career against the social, cultural, and political climate of the capitol of the Hapsburg Empire. Hitler's Vienna was not the artistic and intellectual center normally associated with Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and indignation, a city teeming with the "little people" who rejected Viennese modernity as too international, too "Jewish," and too libertine. Indeed, Hitler's Vienna was a breeding ground for obscure political theories, usually propagated by disadvantaged men living together in hostels. To them, being "better" in this multinational city meant belonging to the "noble German people." Brigitte Hamann compellingly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing social and political ideologies that permeated this city of civil unrest. Drawing on previously untapped resources, she gives us the fullest account ever rendered of the young fuhrer. Hitler's Vienna reveals the vital connection between Hitler's indoctrination into the devastating racial politics that swept Germany's multinational state and the hotbed of nationalistic activity that was Vienna in the early 20th century. It is a profoundly important addition to present Hitler scholarship.