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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.

21 Series Titles


Opera, Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

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 ...

Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema

Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema

1st Edition

By Christopher Morris
November 16, 2016

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing...

Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment

Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment

1st Edition

By Millie Taylor
November 16, 2016

What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway ...

Opera as Soundtrack

Opera as Soundtrack

1st Edition

By Jeongwon Joe
November 10, 2016

Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces ...

Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

1st Edition

Edited By Sarah Hibberd
September 30, 2016

The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in ...

Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures

Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures

1st Edition

Edited By Pamela Karantonis, Dylan Robinson
September 30, 2016

The representation of non-Western cultures in opera has long been a focus of critical inquiry. Within this field, the diverse relationships between opera and First Nations and Indigenous cultures, however, have received far less attention. Opera Indigene takes this subject as its focus, addressing ...

Readying Cavalli's Operas for the Stage Manuscript, Edition, Production

Readying Cavalli's Operas for the Stage: Manuscript, Edition, Production

1st Edition

Edited By Ellen Rosand
September 12, 2016

After more than three centuries of silence, the voice of Francesco Cavalli is being heard loud and clear on the operatic stages of the world. The coincidence of productions at La Scala (Milan) and Covent Garden (London) in the same month (September 2008) of two different operas signals a new stage ...

Musicality in Theatre Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making

Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making

1st Edition

By David Roesner
September 06, 2016

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the...

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories

1st Edition

Edited By Clair Rowden
August 26, 2016

With its first public live performance in Paris on 11 February 1896, Oscar Wilde's Salomé took on female embodied form that signalled the start of 'her' phenomenal journey through the history of the arts in the twentieth century. This volume explores Salome's appropriation and reincarnation across ...

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