"When the curtain goes up on The Teapot Opera there is no music. There are no people, either. But there are plenty of characters: there's the teapot, of course, and a white plastic stallion, a china harpist, a skull, an expresso machine, chess pieces, fruit, the Michelin Tire man, fragments of a classical sculpture, ancient books, a souvenir bust of Teddy Roosevelt, valves and gauges of all kinds, a Shriner's fez, a glass eyeball, billiard balls, and so much more."--Jacket flap.

This first comprehensive study unites musical, literary, documentary and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's compositional practice.

Here at last is the definitive opera story collection, the only one now authorized by the Metropolitan Opera. Written by the associate editor of Opera News magazine, the volume includes the complete plots of 150 different operas, biographical information on all of the 72 composers represented, easy access to the stories through both a table of contents and an index, and a foreword by Peter Allen.

The world's defiinitive single volume of opera reference including: full plot synopses, cast lists, singers, composers, literary and social history, recordings, and much more. Covers over 250 operas performed over the last quarter-century, additional works selected for interest, merit, or historical significance, 64 pages of color plates, 100 black-and-white photographs, fully cross-referenced with indexes and a glossary.

In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being. Weaving between opera's "facts of life" and a series of works including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna" Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.

This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography. Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography. This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualizing the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of

Synopses, plots, and pertinent facts of over one hundred operas.

Detroit on Stage traces the extraordinary history of Detroit’s The Players Club from its beginnings in 1910 until present. Founded in 1910, Detroit’s Players Club is an all-male club devoted to the production of theater by members for other members’ enjoyment. Called simply "The Players," members of the club design, direct, and act in the shows, including playing the female roles. In Detroit on Stage, Marijean Levering takes readers behind the scenes of the club’s private "frolics" to explore the unique history of The Players, discover what traditions they still hold dear, and examine why they have survived relatively unscathed through changes that have shuttered older and more venerable institutions. The Players developed during a nationwide vogue for community and art theater and also as Detroit’s auto elites were in the midst of forming new private clubs to add to their own sense of prestige. By the 1920s, The Players had built their own playhouse and established most of their significant traditions, including the monthly frolics, at which the members perform for each other. At the frolics, members in the audience would wear tuxedos and drink beer out of personalized mugs, customs that remain to this day. Prominent Detroiters have always been among the ranks of the Players, and several well-known auto industry figures were members from the beginning, including banker Henry B. Joy, Oldsmobile sales manager Roy D. Chapin, and Ford executives James Couzens and Edsel Ford. Over the decades that followed the club’s founding, its membership and traditions have remained strong despite major world events that shook Detroit such as Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II. In looking at The Players of today, Levering explores the camaraderie and sense of history that has kept the club together and relatively unchanged throughout the years. She also examines the club’s notable members and its unique place in Detroit history. Detroit on Stage places The Players club in the broader contexts of social clubs, explaining how these organizations originate and function. Readers interested in Detroit cultural history and theater studies will enjoy this rare glimpse inside a long-standing Detroit cultural institution.