Books by Mark Everist

Parisian theatrical, artistic, social, and political life comes alive in Mark Everist's impressive institutional history of the Paris Odeon, an opera house that flourished during the Bourbon Restoration. Everist traces the complete arc of the Odeon's short but highly successful life from ascent to triumph, decline, and closure. He outlines the role it played in expanding operatic repertoire and in changing the face of musical life in Paris. Everist reconstructs the political power structures that controlled the world of Parisian music drama, the internal administration of the theater, and its relationship with composers and librettists, and with the city of Paris itself. His rich depiction of French cultural life and the artistic contexts that allowed the Odeon to flourish highlights the benefit of close and innovative examination of society's institutions.

The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris.

This is the first full length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling the gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century.