'Dramma per musica', the most usual term for Italian serious opera from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, was a modern, enlightened form of theater that presented a unified, artistically designed, dramatic enactment of human stories, expressed by the voice and underscored by the orchestra. This book illustrates the diversity of this baroque art form and explains how it has given us opera as we know it.

"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Will appeal to all music, literature, and art lovers seeking to deepen their knowledge of an increasingly popular repertoire.

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."

From the perennially young, precocious figure of 'little orphan Annie' to the physical and vocal ageing of the eighteenth-century castrato, interlinked cultural constructions of age and gender are central to the historical and contemporary depiction of creative activity and its audiences. Gender, Age and Musical Creativity takes an interdisciplinary approach to issues of identity and its representation, examining intersections of age and gender in relation to music and musicians across a wide range of periods, places, and genres, including female patronage in Renaissance Italy, the working-class brass band tradition of northern England, twentieth-century jazz and popular music cultures, and the contemporary 'New Music' scene. Drawing together the work of musicologists and practitioners, the collection offers new ways in which to conceptualise the complex links between age and gender in both individual and collective practice and their reception: essays explore juvenilia and 'late' style in composition and performance, the role of public and private institutions in fostering and sustaining creative activity throughout the course of musical careers, and the ways in which genres and scenes themselves age over time.

A history of opera in Portugal from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the inauguration of the Teatro de S. Carlos in 1793.

Finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, this landmark book was revised in 2013 to include new knowledge discovered after its initial publication. Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship. Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between the composer's life and his music, showing how Bach's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher. And throughout, we see Bach in the broader context of his time: its institutions, traditions, and influences. With this highly readable book, Wolff sets a new standard for Bach biography.

Publisher Description

A new and fascinating biography of the most outstanding composer in musical history. Covering Bach's earliest efforst in Eisenach, his cultural inheritance, his series of posts as organist or musician, and his stormy career in Leipzig, Bach: The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers traces the significant stages of development in his family and his music.

"The linking theme of the essays collected here is the intersection of musical work with social and cultural practice. Inspired by Professor Strohm's ideas, as is fitting in a volume in his honour, leading scholars in the field explore diverse conceptualizations of the 'work' within the contexts of a specific repertory, over four main sections. Music in Theory and Practice studies the link between treatises and musical practice, and analyses how historical writings can reveal period views on the 'work' in music before 1800. Art and Social Process: Music in Court and Urban Societies looks at the social and cultural practices informing composition from the late Renaissance until the mid-eighteenth century, and interrogates current notions of canon formation and the exchange between local and foreign traditions. Creating an Opera Industry focuses on how genre and artistic autonomy were defined in operas from diverse eras and countries, explaining the role of literature and politics in this process. Finally, The Crisis of Modernity treats nineteenth-century music, offering new models for 'work' and 'context' to challenge reigning theories of the meaning of these terms."--Publisher's website.