Distinguished musicologists, historians, theater professionals, and luminaries of the operatic stage reflect on European history in 1800, 1900 and 2000 through the prism of Puccini's Tosca.

The first comprehensive study of Verdi's perennially popular opera Il trovatore, written by one of the world's great Verdi authorities. No full-length study has ever been written on Il trovatore, in his day Verdi's most successful stage work. This book by one of the world's great Verdi authorities fills that gap, providing a comprehensive look at the opera, from its genesis and structure to its early performance history and critical reception. Starting with the background of the opera, the volume traces the origins of the original play by Antonio García Gutiérrez, El trovador, and offers a new, more credible source for the drama. In addition, it examines the evolution of the libretto, the music, and the arrangement of the narrative, revealing innovative musical and dramatic features not seenby other critics. The book also includes a discussion of contemporary reviews and a section on some of the important performers in the twentieth century (for example, Toscanini and Caruso), as well as a consideration of several ofthe more unusual stagings of the work mounted during the final decades of the century. With these and other explorations, Martin Chusid offers a thorough survey of Verdi's Il trovatore and in the process deepens and enhances our encounter with one of the mainstays of the operatic reparatory. Martin Chusid is Professor Emeritus of Music, New York University, and founding director of the American Institute for Verdi Studies.

Offering queer analyses of paintings by Caravaggio and Puccini and films by Özpetek, Amelio, and Grimaldi, Champagne argues that Italian masculinity has often been articulated through melodrama. Wide in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this much-needed study shows the vital role of affect for both Italian history and masculinity studies.

In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon’s best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon. “A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome.”—Journal of Modern History “An engaging account of Tosca’s Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject.”—History Today “Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling [Nicassio] to bring her story to life.”—History

The first full-length study of the last great era of Italian opera

What is an “Atmosphere”? As part of the book series “Atmospheric Spaces”, this volume analyses a new phenomenological and aesthetic paradigm based on the notion of the “Atmosphere”, conceived as a feeling spread out into the external space rather than as a private mood. The idea of “Atmosphere” is here explored from different perspectives and disciplines, in the context of a full valorization of the so-called “affective turn” in Humanities.

In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.

In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

Giacomo Puccini is one of the most frequently performed and best loved of all operatic composers. In Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style, Andrew Davis takes on the subject of Puccini's last two works to better understand how the composer creates meaning through the juxtaposition of the conventional and the unfamiliar -- situating Puccini in past operatic traditions and modern European musical theater. Davis asserts that hearing Puccini's late works within the context of la solita forma allows listeners to interpret the composer's expressive strategies. He examines Puccini's compositional language, with insightful analyses of melody, orchestration, harmony, voice-leading, and rhythm and meter.

Napoleon I employed a myriad of media through which to promote his propaganda and his universal hegemony. Classical Rome - home to the great Caesars - was central to his ambitious visions for the transformation of Paris into an imperial metropolis of unprecedented magnitude. Exploring the interrelationship between antiquity, the display of power and the reinvention of Paris, this volume evaluates how the Roman world and post-antique exploitations of Rome influenced Napoleonic Paris, and how Napoleon promoted his authority by appropriating Rome's triumphal architecture and its associated symbolism to relocate 'Rome' in his own times. The volume shows how consideration of Louis XIV's legacy is crucial to understanding the evolution of Napoleon's fascination with imperial Rome. It also charts Napoleon's manipulation of the populist rhetoric of Republican France (and Rome) as he moved from being a general fighting for the Revolutionary cause to become the 'absolute' ruler of a new empire.