Books in the Cambridge Studies in Opera series

This edited volume focuses on opera in Italy and France from the 1600s to the present day. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Ceremonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

Focusing on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the twenty-first-century digital age, this book considers how the 'diva's' voice and allure have been created by technologies and media such as theatrical stagecraft, journalism, and the simulcast.

In this book, Rebecca Harris-Warrick dismantles the prevailing notion that dance in French Baroque opera was merely decorative, and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement is essential to understanding the work. Evolving practices in music, librettos, choreography and staging are brought to bear on sixty years of operatic history.

In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses. This is the first comprehensive study of these adaptations. Christina Fuhrmann reveals how integral these operas are to our understanding of early nineteenth-century theatre, opera and canon formation.

Richard Strauss' fifteen operas make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. In the first book to discuss all of Strauss' operas, Bryan Gilliam explores the composer's response to Wagner in his discussion of Strauss's stage works and their historical contexts.

Karen Henson uses four detailed case studies to explore a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and to challenge the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer.

Alessandra Campana examines four late nineteenth-century operas, Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito, Simon Boccanegra by Verdi, Otello by Verdi and Manon Lescaut by Puccini, and a silent film scored by Mascagni, to explore for the first time how opera participated in the making of a modern public in post-unification Italy.

Castelvecchi's book is an in-depth study of the relationship between opera and two major phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe - the cult of sensibility and the emergence of bourgeois drama - and offers a critical re-evaluation of the operatic genre system in the age of Mozart.

How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on European cultural reception of American social identity, shedding new light on familiar works by Mozart and Haydn as well as on lesser-known operas, representing groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.

David Charlton's book provides the first detailed account of opera in the society of Louis XV, from Rameau to Gluck. Offering many new perspectives on opera's development and Rousseau's contributions to it, the book will be essential to those with interests in music, theatre, literature and pre-Revolution culture.

Verdi's operas portray a striking diversity of female protagonists, including warrior women, courtesans, gypsies and feisty townswomen. Contextualising these characters within the social, cultural and political history of their period, Susan Rutherford examines the shifting and complex relationships between them and their female spectators in nineteenth-century Italy.

Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas pere, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verne, Leroux and Proust, among many other French novelists, all wrote fiction set partly at the opera. Cormac Newark examines the development of this tradition in a rich study that will appeal to scholars of music, literature and cultural history alike.

Situating opera within social, historical and aesthetic contexts, this study focuses on the experience of audiences and individuals over time. Lindenberger uses insights from diverse areas such as recent neuroscience and social thought to rethink the nature of opera, exemplifying opera studies as an emerging field of interdisciplinary study.

Wagner's Ring cycle, argues Foster, follows an evolutionary model of Greek poetry and politics adapted from Hegel. Providing a thorough analysis of three of the most important poetic genres - epic, lyric, and drama - this book interrogates the ways in which Wagner uses Greek aesthetics to further his own ideological goals.

Focusing on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the twenty-first-century digital age, this book considers how the 'diva's' voice and allure have been created by technologies and media such as theatrical stagecraft, journalism, and the simulcast.

Thomas considers the use of operatic spectacle and music by Louis XIV as a vehicle for absolutism; the resistance of music to the aesthetic and political agendas of the time; and the long-term development of opera in eighteenth-century humanist culture, examining key works by Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, among others.

Emanuele Senici offers a new and unusual look at Italian opera in the nineteenth century, focusing on operas which present Alpine virgins as the female protagonist. The book explores the connection between landscape and gender in opera, from Bellini's La sonnambula (1831) to Puccini's La fanciulla del West (1910).

A detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions that were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

Examining both famous and unknown artists, this book offers a reappraisal of the female operatic singer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house.

Best known for light-hearted works such as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious works after moving to Paris in 1924. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book portrays a composer whose powerful music resonated with the experience of contemporary life.

This edited volume focuses on opera in Italy and France from the 1600s to the present day. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

Explores the world of Vienna and the development of opera buffa (a form of comic opera) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Among the topics examined are Mozart and eighteenth-century comedy; gender, nature and bourgeois society on Mozart's buffa stage; as well as close analyses of key works such as Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro.

The final years of the Habsburg Empire were accompanied by a new musical genre, Viennese operetta, and no composer was better suited than Johann Strauss to express his city's pride and anxiety during the period. Camille Crittenden provides an overview of Viennese operetta and examines Strauss's role as national icon.

German opera from its primitive origins up to Wagner is the subject of this wide-ranging history. The many operas studied are placed in their historical, social and theatrical context, and attention is paid to the literary, artistic and philosophical ideas that made them part of the country's intellectual history.

Explores the world of Vienna and the development of opera buffa (a form of comic opera) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Among the topics examined are Mozart and eighteenth-century comedy; gender, nature and bourgeois society on Mozart's buffa stage; as well as close analyses of key works such as Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro.

This is a comprehensive critical study of the nineteenth-century French grand opera La Juive, by Halevy. Hallman explores the politically charged messages of the opera within the context of French social history and addresses the opera's portrayal of religious intolerance and antisemitic attitudes towards Jews in French society.

This 2004 book is a full-length, scholarly study of what is widely regarded as Mozart's most enigmatic opera and Lorenzo Da Ponte's most erudite text. Goehring's study shows how Cosi affirms comedy's regenerative powers and its capacity to grant access to modes of sympathy and understanding that are otherwise inaccessible.

This book explores the cultural life of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London. Through primary sources, many analysed for the first time, Ian Woodfield examines such issues as finances, recruitment policy, handling of singers and composers, links with Paris and Italy, and the role of women in opera management.