A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.

Goethe's Faust, a work which has attracted the attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century, hashad a seminal impact in musical realms.

The present volume meets a frequently expressed demand as it is the first collection of all the relevant essays and articles which Steven Paul Scher has written on Literature and Music over a period of almost forty years in the field of Word and Music Studies. Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, is one of the founding fathers of Word and Music Studies and a leading authority in what is in the meantime a well-established intermedial field. He has published very widely in a variety of journals and collections of essays, which until now have not always been easy to lay one's hands on. His work covers a wide range of subjects and comprises theoretical, methodological and historical studies, which include discussions of Ferruccio Busoni, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Judith Weir, the Talking Heads and many others and which pay special attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism. The range and depth of these studies have made him the 'mastermind' of Word and Music Studies who has defined the basic aims and objectives of the discipline. This volume is of interest to literary scholars and musicologists as well as comparatists and all those concerned about the rapidly expanding field of Intermedia Studies.

Ranging widely through discoveries in acoustics, emotion, healing, cognition, neuroscience, and infant development, Silvia Bencivelli covers the state of the art in research about our relationship with music and presents several possible conclusions.

This addition to the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series is also the first full-length study of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. It aims to familiarize the reader with all aspect of the work: Mozart's writing of the opera and its literary antecedents, its plot, its musical structure, its reception and performance history. The reader will find much that is new in Thomas Bauman's study. He discusses the opera in relation to other Oriental operas, in the light of eighteenth-centruy apprehensions of the East, and as an attempt to reconcile the conventions of German opera in the early 1780s with Viennese taste and Mozart's own maturing operatic aesthetic. The text is well illustrated with pictures and music examples and a full discography lists the available recordings of the opera. This will be essential reading for all who have an interest in Mozart's operas, whether as student, scholar or opera-lover.

This book collects key writings about eighteenth century music . It brings together for the first time in one place, a wide selection of essential documents not only about music theory and practice, but about the historical, philosophical, aesthetic, ideological, and literary debates which held sway during a century when musical thought and criticism gained a privileged position in the culture of Europe. Enrico Fubini offers a sampling of English, French, German, and Italian writings on topics ranging from Enlightenment rationalism and the theories of harmony to German musical culture and the polemics on J. S. Bach. Organized by topic and historical period these selections go beyond writings dealing exclusively with specific musical works to larger issues of theory and the reception of musical ideas in the culture at large. The selections are from books, journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and letters; the contributors include Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Grimm, Alfieri, Rameau, Quantz, Gluck, Tartini, Leopold and W. A. Mozart, and C. P .E. Bach. Many are translated here for the first time. With general and chapter introductions, restored footnotes, and other valuable annotations, and a biographical appendix, this anthology will interest music scholars, students, and teachers.

The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music provides a significant contribution to the research and history of Spanish film music, exploring the interdependence and ways in which discourses of sound and vision are constructed dialogically in Spanish cinema, with contributions from leading international researchers from Spain, the USA, the UK, France and Germany. Offering a multifocal and multidisciplinary study between related areas such as music studies, film studies and Spanish cultural studies, this book is divided into four sections, covering the early years of Spanish cinema; the 1940s and 1950s in Spanish cinema—the first decades of the Franco dictatorship; the importance of Fraga Iribarne’s slogan, “Spain is different,” to promote Spain’s new openness to the world in the 1960s and 1970s; and Spanish cinema since the arrival of democracy in 1978, including discussion of contemporary Spanish cinema. The growing interest in Spanish cinema calls for the publication of studies about the role of music in its political and socio-cultural framework. This is therefore a valuable text for music and film scholars and professionals, university undergraduates and music conservatory students.

Inside the Texas State Prison is a surprising story of ingenuity, optimism and musical creativity. During the mid-twentieth century, inmates at the Huntsville unit and neighboring Goree State Farm for Women captured hearts all over Texas during weekly radio broadcasts and live stage performances. WBAP's Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls took listeners inside the penitentiary to hear not only the prisoners? songs but also the stories of those who sang them. Captivating and charismatic, banjo player Reable Childs received thousands of fan letters with the Goree All-Girl String Band during World War II. Hattie Ellis, a young black inmate with a voice that rivaled Billie Holiday's, was immortalized by notable folklorist John Avery Lomax. Cowboys, songsters and champion fiddlers all played a part in one of the most unique prison histories in the nation. Caroline Gnagy presents the decades-long story of the Texas convict bands, informed by prison records, radio show transcripts and the words and music of the inmates themselves.