Focusing on the operas of Mozart, Gluck, and Rameau, Building the Operatic Museum examines the role that eighteenth-century works played in the opera houses of Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. These works, mostly neglected during the nineteenth century, became the main exhibits in what William Gibbons calls the Operatic Museum -- a physical and conceptual space in which great masterworks from the past and present could, like works of visual art in the Louvre, entertain audiences while educating them in their own history and national identity. Drawing on the fields of musicology, museum studies, art history, and literature, Gibbons explores how this "museum" transformed Parisian musical theater into a place of cultural memory, dedicated to the display of French musical greatness. William Gibbons is Associate Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University.

Building a masterpiece explores some of the untold chapters in the long history of the Opera House's gestation, development and completion -- of individuals whose careers were made or broken by the Opera House, the companies whose reputations were secured through their association with the building, and the pioneering construction methods, innovative technologies and methodologies developed to meet the demands of its unprecedented design and challenging construction. The workers who built the building, the politicians, architects and members of the public who championed it and its often beleaguered architect are discussed as is its current world status as a symbol of Australia.To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Opera House, this new edition of Building a Masterpiece will include a new chapter on another little known and much misunderstood story: the architect who took over from Utzon and completed the project.

Curation as a concept and a catchword in modern parlance has, over recent decades, become deeply ingrained in modern culture. The purpose of this study is to explore the curatorial forces at work within the modern opera house and to examine the functionaries and processes that guide them. In turn, comparisons are made with the workings of the traditional art museum, where artworks are studied, preserved, restored, displayed and contextualised – processes which are also present in the opera house. Curatorial roles in each institution are identified and described, and the role of the celebrity art curator is compared with that of the modern stage director, who has acquired previously undreamt-of licence to interrogate operatic works, overlaying them with new concepts and levels of meaning in order to reinvent and redefine the operatic repertoire for contemporary needs. A point of coalescence between the opera house and the art museum is identified, with the transformation, towards the end of the nineteenth century, of the opera house into the operatic museum. Curatorial practices in the opera house are examined, and further communalities and synergies in the way that ‘works’ are defined in each institution are explored. This study also considers the so-called ‘birth’ of opera around the start of the seventeenth century, with reference to the near-contemporary rise of the modern art museum, outlining operatic practice and performance history over the last 400 years in order to identify the curatorial practices that have historically been employed in the maintenance and development of the repertoire. This examination of the forces of curation within the modern opera house will highlight aspects of authenticity, authorial intent, preservation, restoration and historically informed performance practice.

A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

A bold application of the concept of canonical works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.

Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in urban planning, too this is, perhaps surprisingly, often still the case. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by tracing its evolution from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most canonic art forms still in existence. Throughout the book, a lively assembly of musicologists, historians, and industry professionals tackle key questions of opera's past, present, and future. Why did its canon evolve so differently from that of concert music? Why do its top ten titles, all more than a century old, now account for nearly a quarter of all performances worldwide? Why is this system of production becoming still more top-heavy, even while the repertory seemingly expands, notably to include early music? Topics range from the seventeenth century to the present day, from Russia to England and continental Europe to the Americas. To reflect the contested nature of many of them, each is addressed in paired chapters. These complement each other in different ways: by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting or changing contexts. Posing its questions in fresh, provocative terms, The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon challenges scholarly assumptions in music and cultural history, and reinvigorates the dialogue with an industry that is, despite everything, still growing.

A vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists haver overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground, its monopoly on history"

The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture is the most comprehensive reference work in this complex and diverse area of art history. Built on the acclaimed scholarship of the Grove Dictionary of Art, this work offers over 1,600 up-to-date entries on Islamic art and architecture ranging from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, Africa, and Europe and spans over a thousand years of history. Recent changes in Islamic art in areas such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are elucidated here by distinguished scholars. Entries provide in-depth art historical and cultural information about dynasties, art forms, artists, architecture, rulers, monuments, archaeological sites and stylistic developments. In addition, over 500 illustrations of sculpture, mosaic, painting, ceramics, architecture, metalwork and calligraphy illuminate the rich artistic tradition of the Islamic world. With the fundamental understanding that Islamic art is not limited to a particular region, or to a defined period of time, The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture offers pathways into Islamic culture through its art.

Designers employ a variety of tools and techniques for speculating about buildings before they are built. In their simplest form, these are personal thought experiments. However, embracing advanced computer simulations means engaging a network of specialized people and powerful machines. In this book, Yanni Alexander Loukissas demonstrates that new tools have profound implications for the social distribution of design work; computer simulations are technologies for collective imagination. Organized around the accounts of professional designers engaged in a high-stakes competition to redefine their work for the technological moment, this book explores the emerging cultures of computer simulation in architecture. Not only architects, but acousticians, fire safety engineers, and sustainability experts see themselves as co-designers in architecture, engaging new technologies for simulation in an evolving search for the roles and relationships that can bring them both professional acceptance and greater control over design. By illustrating how practices of simulation inform the social relationships and professional distinctions that define contemporary architecture, the book examines the cultural transformations taking place in design practice today.