ROMANTIC AFFINITIES

CHRISTIANSEN, Rupert

History

RANDOM HOUSE UK

A guide to opera's greatest female singers over the last 300 years.

Prima Donna: A History

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin??Books

Between 1869 and 1875, Paris was known to the world as "the new Babylon." A city obsessed with sex and money and ruled by the ailing tyrant Louis Napoleon and his ruthless wife Eugenie, Paris was a place of intensity, violence and volatility. Tracing Europe's most glittering capital as it tettered on the verge of the Franco-Prussian War and the horror that ensued, Christiansen evokes one of the most dramatic periods of modern history. photos.

Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune

Ancient Civilizations

A guide to opera's greatest female singers over the last 300 years.

Prima donna: A history

Arts & Photography

Music

Bodley Head

This book offers a series of kaleidoscopic portraits from an era of change in Europe as it was experienced and communicated by the writers of the age. These include not only the more familiar "Romantic" figures, such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Goethe, but also Holderlin, Hoffman, Pushkin, Chenier, Madame de Stael and many others. It is set against the background of the initial liberal dawning that the French Revolution seemed to herald, the disillusion that set in after its descent into terror and the decades of warfare that followed. The author has drawn on recent scholarship ranging over many related aspects of contemporary politics and culture as he presents fresh perspectives on poetry and prose long defined narrowly as Romanticism.

Romantic affinities: Portraits from an age, 1780-1830

About the Author\nRupert Christiansen is the dance critic for The Spectator. He was also the dance critic for The Mail on Sunday from 1995 to 2020 and has written on dance-focused subjects for many publications in the United Kingdom and the United States, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper’s & Queen, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Literary Review, Dance Now, and Dance Theatre Journal. He was the opera critic and arts correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1996 to 2020 and is the author of a dozen nonfiction books, including Romantic Affinities and City of Light. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and lives in London.\n“Amusing and assertive . . . It distills Diaghilev’s life down to its concentrated, aromatic, essence . . . [Rupert Christiansen] seems to have undergone the task for the sheer love of it, and his delight is infectious.” ―Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times\nRupert Christiansen, a renowned dance critic and arts correspondent, presents a sweeping history of the Ballets Russes and of Serge Diaghilev’s dream of bringing Russian art and culture to the West.\nSerge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, is often said to have invented modern ballet. An art critic and connoisseur, Diaghilev had no training in dance or choreography, but he had a dream of bringing Russian art, music, design, and expression to the West and a mission to drive a cultural and artistic revolution.\nBringing together such legendary talents as Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, this complex and visionary genius created a new form of ballet defined by artistic integrity, creative freedom, and an all-encompassing experience of art, movement, and music. The explosive color combinations, sensual and androgynous choreography, and experimental sounds of the Ballets Russes were called “barbaric” by the Parisian press, but its radical style usurped the entrenched mores of traditional ballet and transformed the European cultural sphere at large.\nDiaghilev’s Empire, the publication of which marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev’s birth, is a daring, impeccably researched reassessment of the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes and the Russian Revolution in twentieth-century art and culture. Rupert Christiansen, a leading dance critic, explores the fiery conflicts, outsize personalities, and extraordinary artistic innovations that make up this enduring story of triumph and disaster.

Diaghilev's Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World

Humor & Entertainment

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Set against the hopes and dreams inspired by the French Revolution, the disillusion caused by its failure and the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars that followed, Rupert Christiansen draws the threads into narrative. Ranging over politics, art, music and using the voices of celebrated Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Goethe and Pushkin, as well as the less familiar Chenier, Holderlin, Hoffmann and de Stael, he recreates one of the most fascinating and complex periods of modern history and offers fresh perspectives on its literature and culture.

Romantic Affinities

Literature & Fiction

Classics

G.P.Putnam's Sons

Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. The Complete Book of Aunts is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources. Bewitching illustrations and anecdotes illuminate various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, and X-Rated Aunts. With stories and poems about famous or historical aunts, Christiansen and Brophy attempt to uncover what "aunt-ness" is.

The Complete Book of Aunts

Health, Fitness & Dieting

12-Hachette Book Group

Arthur Hugh Clough is the great undiscovered genius of Victorian literature. The golden hope of his generation at Rugby and Oxford, he battled against the orthodoxies of his time to produce some of the 19th century’s most witty and original verse. Sexually and morally tortured, he died at a tragically early age, his health destroyed by his devotion to the cause of Florence Nightingale. In this study, Rupert Christiansen draws on newly discovered documents to present a dramatic portrait of a maverick figure, whose radical ideas about politics, religion, and women will make him vividly sympathetic to modern readers.

The Voice of Victorian Sex: Arthur H. Clough 1819-1861 (Short Lives)

Arts & Literature

Short Books

A concise but comprehensive guide to understanding and enjoying opera Opera is a wonderful musical form--but the prospect of attending performances can be quite daunting for the uninitiated. The sense of insecurity about the entire enterprise--What is the plot about? What is the music like? What should one listen for? What should one look for on the stage? What are the best recordings and videos to buy?--can discourage would-be fans from making that first step into this extraordinary world. In A Pocket Guide to Opera, Rupert Christiansen, a leading music critic, addresses all these questions head-on to provide a highly readable guide to eighty of today's most popular operas, ranging from the Baroque operas of Gluck and Cavalli through the classical operas of Mozart and the nineteenth-century masterpieces by Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini, and on to twentieth-century works from Strauss, Stravinsky, and others. In addition to offering a pithy synopsis of each opera, A Pocket Guide to Opera also includes short sections on the history of each work, descriptions of the main characters, and guidance on what to look for in a performance and what to listen to in a recording, as well as recommendations for the best recording, video and DVD. The resulting book is today's best one-volume introduction and guide to opera--a concise but comprehensive volume that every opera fan should own.

A Pocket Guide to Opera

Faber&Faber

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Books by CHRISTIANSEN, Rupert