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

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.

The perfect accompaniment to courses on eighteenth-century opera for both students and teachers, this Companion is a definitive reference resource.

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field looks at various aspects of musical life in eighteenth-century Britain. The significant roles played by institutions such as the Freemasons and foreign embassy chapels in promoting music making and introducing foreign styles to English music are examined, as well as the influence exerted by individuals, both foreign and British. The book covers the spectrum of British music, both sacred and secular, and both cosmopolitan and provincial. In doing so it helps to redress the picture of eighteenth-century British music which has previously portrayed Handel and London as its primary constituents.

Traditional musicology has tended to see the Spanish eighteenth century as a period of decline, but this 1998 volume shows it to be rich in interest and achievement. Covering stage genres, orchestral and instrumental music and vocal music (both sacred and secular), it brings together the results of research on such topics as opera, musical instruments, the secular cantata and the villancico and challenges received ideas about how Italian and Austrian music of the period influenced (or was opposed by) Spanish composers and theorists. Two final chapters outline the presence of Spanish musical sources in the New World.

In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as »pasticcios« since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles.

Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances, who the people-composers and performers-were who made opera possible. The essays for this volume capture the principal themes of current research: the "idea" of opera, opera criticism, the people of opera, and the emerging technologies of opera.

Romanticism was always culturally diverse. Though English-language anthologies have previously tended to see Romanticism as predominantly British, the term itself actually originated in Germany, where it became the banner of a Europe-wide movement involving the profound intellectual and aesthetic changes which we now associate with modernity. This anthology is the first to place British Romanticism within a comprehensive and multi-lingual European context, showing how ideas and writers interconnected across national and linguistic boundaries. By reprinting everything in the original languages, together with an English translation of all non-English material in parallel on the opposite page, it offers a new intellectual map of Romanticism. Material is thematically arranged as follows: - Art & Aesthetics - The Self - History - Language - Hermeneutics & Theology - Nature - The Exotic - Science While focusing on European texts, the inclusion of essays on their North American and Japanese reception means that Romanticism can be seen as a global phenomenon, influencing a surprising number of the ways in which the modern world sees itself.