Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera
About the Book Series
The Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series provides a centralized and prominent forum for the presentation of cutting-edge scholarship that draws on numerous disciplinary approaches to a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance, and reception of opera and related genres in various historical and social contexts. Studies of all kinds, especially those that go beyond traditional approaches to reflect new perspectives not only in musicology, but in areas such as comparative literature, social history, philosophy, visual arts, theatre history and performance studies, film studies, political science, psychoanalysis, science, and medicine, are welcome. The series continues to move important scholarly trends forward by encouraging original scholarship that interrogates the complex means of artistic expression operative in opera. Essay collections and monographs on topics from the seventeenth century to contemporary times and from all geographical locations, including non-Western topics, are welcome.
Genre Beyond Borders: Reassessing Operetta
1st Edition
Edited
By Bruno Bower, Elisabeth Honn Hoegberg, Sonja Starkmeth
June 27, 2025
This book offers an innovative approach to understanding operetta, drawing attention to its malleability and resistance to boundaries. These shows have traversed (and continue to traverse) with ease the national borders which might superficially define them, or draw on features from many other ...
Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain
1st Edition
Edited
By Roberta Montemorra Marvin
May 27, 2024
Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain addresses operatic “experiences” outside the opera houses of Britain during the nineteenth century. The essays adopt a variety of perspectives exploring the processes through which opera and ideas about opera were cultivated and ...
Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation
1st Edition
Edited
By Ellen Rosand, Stefano La Via
January 29, 2024
Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive ...
Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century
1st Edition
By Caitlin Vincent
May 31, 2023
Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century is the first definitive study of the use of digital scenography in Western opera production. The book begins by exploring digital scenography’s dramaturgical possibilities and establishes a critical framework for identifying and comparing the...
The Operas of Rameau: Genesis, Staging, Reception
1st Edition
Edited
By Graham Sadler, Shirley Thompson, Jonathan Williams
May 31, 2023
In recent years, interest in Rameau’s operas has grown enormously. These works are no longer regarded as peripheral by performers and audiences but are increasingly staged in the world’s major opera houses and festivals, while the production of first-rate recordings on CD and DVD continues to ...
The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni
1st Edition
By Magnus Tessing Schneider
May 31, 2023
The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his ...
Curating Opera: Reinventing the Past Through Museums of Opera and Art
1st Edition
By Stephen Mould
August 29, 2022
Curation as a concept and a catchword in modern parlance has, over recent decades, become deeply ingrained in modern culture. The purpose of this study is to explore the curatorial forces at work within the modern opera house and to examine the functionaries and processes that guide them. In turn, ...
Contextualizing Melodrama in the Czech Lands: In Concert and on Stage
1st Edition
By Judith Mabary
April 29, 2022
The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few are aware that there exists a type of ...
Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven
1st Edition
By Martin Nedbal
February 07, 2019
This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about ...
National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths Reconsidered
1st Edition
By Michael Halliwell
February 07, 2019
Opera has been performed in Australia for more than two hundred years, yet none of the operas written before the Second World War have become part of the repertoire. It is only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that there is evidence of the successful systematic production of indigenous opera....
Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688
1st Edition
By Andrew Walkling
February 05, 2019
Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688–89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which a ...
Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body
1st Edition
By Jelena Novak
July 26, 2017
Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of ...