Description
What is opera? Contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Opera respond to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: Words, Music, and Meaning; Performance and Production; Opera and Society; and Transmission and Reception. Individual essays engage with repertoire from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Meyerbeer to Strauss, Henze, and Adams in studies of composition, national identity, transmission, reception, sources, media, iconography, humanism, the art of collecting, theory, analysis, commerce, singers, directors, criticism, editions, politics, staging, race, and gender. The title of the penultimate section, Opera on the Edge, suggests the uncertainty of opera's future: is opera headed toward catastrophe or have social and musical developments of the last hundred years stimulated something new and exciting, and, well, operatic? In an epilogue to the volume, a contemporary opera composer speaks candidly about opera composition today. The Oxford Handbook of Opera is an essential companion to scholars, educators, advanced students, performers, and knowledgeable listeners: those who simply love opera.
About the Author
Helen M. Greenwald is Chair of Music History & Musicology at New England Conservatory. She is the author of numerous articles on vocal music from the 18th -20th centuries and program notes for major arts organizations, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera. She is the editor of the critical edition of Verdi's Attila (Ricordi and the University of Chicago Press, 2012) and co-editor of the critical edition of Rossini's Zelmira (Fondazione Rossini, 2005).
Reviews
[I]f one wishes to engage broadly and in-depth with this infuriating but addictive art form...[t]here are many hours of fascinating reading therein. * Australian Book Review *
Greenwald and her large cast are to be congratulated on having produced a major contribution to opera scholarship. No single theme or thesis is propounded; rather, the book covers an exceptionally wide range of issues intelligently investigated. * Opera *
The best writers here are erudite,witty, thoughtful, a little weird. They can analyse and explain but they are are still prepared to surrender to the impact of a greedy, usually overtly emotional art form. * The Times Literary Supplement *
I don't know any other book quite like this...Drawing upon the enormously varied ways the performing arts are experienced, this handbook shows how modern scholarship commands the routes into thinking and writing about the constantly evolving genre of opera. The range of subject matter is remarkable. After an exhilarating plunge into the possible responses to the question posed in Tim Carter's sparkling essay, "What is Opera," the book settles into a more sober assessment of the basics of genre, form, and style, plots and the words they are told in, and some of the controversies and curiosities embedded in this multi-dimensional medium. It is an inviting approach: the structure is clear and...the language is accessible...Some chapters seem destined to become classics...This impressive handbook...deserves to be in frequent use... * The Musical Times *
It's good, and rightly contemporary, to see some 250 pages, more than a fifth of the text, given up to "Performance and Production," a subject now recognized as integral to assessing opera in print...Because it is new and has contributions from a large number of scholars working at the coalface of their subjects...the Handbook's strength is its close contact with a wide range of current opera scholarship...It is also readable in a way that might have been considered suspect a few decades ago...[I]t looks handsome and has been well printed, the illustrations included. * The Wagner Journal *
[The Oxford Handbook of Opera] offers us an unprecedentedly thorough cross-examination of the many positions and approaches now taken within what might be called 'opera studies.'...A wealth of intriguing material is presented in these essays...It is nonetheless the three chapters that explicitly address editorial practice that are most thought-provoking in the context of [The Oxford Handbook of Opera] as a whole. Taken together, these contributions...will offer many readers a rare insight into the processes, decisions, and difficulties that surround and inform one of the discipline's more mysterious portals to contemporary operatic culture. * Music and Letters *
Book Information
ISBN 9780197625453
Author Helen M. Greenwald
Format Paperback
Page Count 1216
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 2g
Dimensions(mm) 249mm * 170mm * 62mm
About the Author
Helen M. Greenwald is Chair of Music History & Musicology at New England Conservatory. She is the author of numerous articles on vocal music from the 18th -20th centuries and program notes for major arts organizations, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera. She is the editor of the critical edition of Verdi's Attila (Ricordi and the University of Chicago Press, 2012) and co-editor of the critical edition of Rossini's Zelmira (Fondazione Rossini, 2005).
Reviews
[I]f one wishes to engage broadly and in-depth with this infuriating but addictive art form...[t]here are many hours of fascinating reading therein. * Australian Book Review *
Greenwald and her large cast are to be congratulated on having produced a major contribution to opera scholarship. No single theme or thesis is propounded; rather, the book covers an exceptionally wide range of issues intelligently investigated. * Opera *
The best writers here are erudite,witty, thoughtful, a little weird. They can analyse and explain but they are are still prepared to surrender to the impact of a greedy, usually overtly emotional art form. * The Times Literary Supplement *
I don't know any other book quite like this...Drawing upon the enormously varied ways the performing arts are experienced, this handbook shows how modern scholarship commands the routes into thinking and writing about the constantly evolving genre of opera. The range of subject matter is remarkable. After an exhilarating plunge into the possible responses to the question posed in Tim Carter's sparkling essay, "What is Opera," the book settles into a more sober assessment of the basics of genre, form, and style, plots and the words they are told in, and some of the controversies and curiosities embedded in this multi-dimensional medium. It is an inviting approach: the structure is clear and...the language is accessible...Some chapters seem destined to become classics...This impressive handbook...deserves to be in frequent use... * The Musical Times *
It's good, and rightly contemporary, to see some 250 pages, more than a fifth of the text, given up to "Performance and Production," a subject now recognized as integral to assessing opera in print...Because it is new and has contributions from a large number of scholars working at the coalface of their subjects...the Handbook's strength is its close contact with a wide range of current opera scholarship...It is also readable in a way that might have been considered suspect a few decades ago...[I]t looks handsome and has been well printed, the illustrations included. * The Wagner Journal *
[The Oxford Handbook of Opera] offers us an unprecedentedly thorough cross-examination of the many positions and approaches now taken within what might be called 'opera studies.'...A wealth of intriguing material is presented in these essays...It is nonetheless the three chapters that explicitly address editorial practice that are most thought-provoking in the context of [The Oxford Handbook of Opera] as a whole. Taken together, these contributions...will offer many readers a rare insight into the processes, decisions, and difficulties that surround and inform one of the discipline's more mysterious portals to contemporary operatic culture. * Music and Letters *
Book Information
ISBN 9780197625453
Author Helen M. Greenwald
Format Paperback
Page Count 1216
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 2g
Dimensions(mm) 249mm * 170mm * 62mm
