This collection of essays explores the relationship between opera and the development of media technology from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Taking an international perspective, the contributing authors, each with extensive experience as scholars or practitioners of the art, cover a variety of topics including audio, video and film recording, contemporary critical responses, popular and "high brow" culture, live and recorded performance, lighting and performance technology, media marketing and advertising.

The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to life dominant personalities and memorable performances of the time. From the opening night Faust to the recent controversial production of Wagner’s "Ring," Grand Opera is a remarkable account of management and audience response to the push and pull of tradition and reinvention. Spanning the decades between the Gilded Age and the age of new media, this story of the Met concludes by tipping its hat to the hugely successful "Live in HD" simulcasts and other twenty-first-century innovations. Grand Opera’s appeal extends far beyond the large circle of opera enthusiasts. Drawing on unpublished documents from the Metropolitan Opera Archives, reviews, recordings, and much more, this richly detailed book looks at the Met in the broad context of national and international issues and events.

In this new work, Paul Jackson examines the decade that saw the move from the old house uptown to the technological marvel at Lincoln Center. There Rudolf Bing's final six years give way to four seasons of management turmoil until 1976, when James Levine was named music director and took hold of the Met's artistic future.

'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.

First published in 1999, this original and entertaining sociological study takes a comprehensive and critical view of opera as unique cultural artefact as loss making ‘industry’, as institution with a ‘museum’ culture, and as consumed commodity of rare distinction and elaborate ritual. Specific chapters deal with opera within the contexts of musicological analysis, auratic art and fetishized taste: opera as business and as ‘museum’: singers’ opera: producers’ opera and audiences’ opera. There is also a chapter on ‘opera’: popular, commercialised fragments of opera outside the opera house, consumed by and through all manner of reproduced means: CD, video, Three Tenors concerts: film and TV soundtracks: advertising jingles etc. Despite the supposed popularisation and successful commercial exploitation of ‘opera’ during the past decade or so, this study concludes that opera remains an art-form, institution and ritual of relative inaccessibility and exclusiveness. The commercial interest in and profitability of ‘opera’ do not translate into new ‘popular’ audiences in the opera house. The increased dependency of opera companies on corporate funding in the face of retreating government subsidies may have brought a new ‘elite’ audience into the expensive seats, pandered to by the introduction of surtitles etc., but the traditional ‘elite’ has succeeded in closing down entry to opera in other select venues where opera continues to confirm and maintain their select identity and prestige of their life-style.

A collection of essays examining the roles played by music in American and European society during the Second World War. Global conflicts of the twentieth century fundamentally transformed not only national boundaries, power relations, and global economies, but also the arts and culture of every nation involved. An important, unacknowledged aspect of these conflicts is that they have unique musical soundtracks. Music in World War II explores how music and sound took on radically different dimensions in the United States and Europe before, during, and after World War II. Additionally, the collection examines the impact of radio and film as the disseminators of the war’s musical soundtrack. Contributors contend that the European and American soundtrack of World War II was largely one of escapism rather than the lofty, solemn, heroic, and celebratory mode of “war music” in the past. Furthermore, they explore the variety of experiences of populations forced from their homes and interned in civilian and POW camps in Europe and the United States, examining how music in these environments played a crucial role in maintaining ties to an idealized “home” and constructing politicized notions of national and ethnic identity. This fascinating, well-constructed volume of essays builds understanding of the role and importance of music during periods of conflict and highlights the unique aspects of music during World War II. “A collection that offers deeply informed, interdisciplinary, and original views on a myriad of musical practices in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States during the period.” —Gayle Magee, co-editor of Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I

(Amadeus). In this first of three volumes, Paul Jackson begins a rich and detailed history of the early years of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, bringing to life more than 200 recorded broadcasts.

Designed as a companion volume to 2006's Inside the Ring, which focused on the four operas comprising Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, this new volume features more than a dozen original essays focusing on all of Wagner's non-Ring operas. Part One looks at the individual operas, including Der Fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Part Two reveals the connections between Wagnerian opera and other arts, including dance, filmmaking, and fiction. Finally, Part Three examines Wagner's operas in performance, featuring interviews with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and heldentenor Ben Heppner, both well-known for their Wagnerian performances. The book includes many photographs from current productions by the Metropolitan Opera and other opera companies, along with bibliographies and a discography of recommended performances.

Just Beyond Listening asks how we might think about encounters with sound that complicate standard accounts of aurality. In a series of essays, Michael C. Heller considers how sound functions in dialogue with a range of sensory and affective modalities, including physical co-presence, textual interference, and spectral haunting. The text investigates sound that is experienced in other parts of the body, altered by cross-wirings of the senses, weaponized by the military, or mediated and changed by cultural practices and memory. Building on recent scholarship in sound studies and affect theory, Heller questions not only how sound propagates acoustically but how sonic presences temper our total experience of the world around us.