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.
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and American Musical Identity
1st Edition
By Kathryn Fenton
April 01, 2021
On 10 December 1910, Giacomo Puccini’s seventh opera, La fanciulla del West, had its premiere before a sold-out audience at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. The performance was the Metropolitan Opera Company’s first world premiere by any composer. By all accounts, the premiere was an ...
Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera
1st Edition
Edited
By Wendy Heller, Eleonora Stoppino
March 31, 2021
The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid ...
The Grand Theater of the World: Music, Space, and the Performance of Identity in Early Modern Rome
1st Edition
Edited
By Valeria De Lucca, Christine Jeanneret
March 31, 2021
Music and space in the early modern world shaped each other in profound ways, and this is particularly apparent when considering Rome, a city that defined itself as the "grande teatro del mondo". The aim of this book is to consider music and space as fundamental elements in the performance of ...
English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706
1st Edition
By Andrew R. Walkling
December 18, 2020
English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth ...
Grétry's Operas and the French Public: From the Old Regime to the Restoration
1st Edition
By R.J. Arnold
June 30, 2020
Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand ...
The Business of Opera
1st Edition
Edited
By Anastasia Belina-Johnson, Derek B. Scott
June 30, 2020
The study of the business of opera has taken on new importance in the present harsh economic climate for the arts. This book presents research that sheds new light on a range of aspects concerning marketing, audience development, promotion, arts administration and economic issues that beset ...
Grand Opera Outside Paris: Opera on the Move in Nineteenth-Century Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Jens Hesselager
December 12, 2019
Nineteenth-century French grand opera was a musical and cultural phenomenon with an important and widespread transnational presence in Europe. Primary attention in the major studies of the genre has so far been on the Parisian context for which the majority of the works were originally written. In ...
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 R. 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 ...
Opera, Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
1st Edition
By Anthony R. DelDonna
November 17, 2016
The operatic culture of late eighteenth-century Naples represents the fullest expression of a matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs linking aristocratic, public and religious spheres of contemporary society. The considerable resonance of 'Neapolitan' opera in ...