Abbate and Parker's A History of Opera is the first full new history of opera in sixty years - now in paperback in an updated second edition 'The best single volume ever written on the subject' The Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their scrupulous and provocative retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the means by which it communicates, and its societal role. In a new revision with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century this book explores the tensions that have sustained opera over 400 years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre's most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to transform the viewer with its enduring power.

A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years

Arts & Photography

Parker, Roger

Abbate, Carolyn

Music

Penguin Uk

This anthology contains eighteen representative examples of the particular difficulties presented by twentieth-century scores, stimulating consideration of the relationship between what is seen (the score) and what is heard (the music). The emphasis in the period before 1945 is on major composers: Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Varese, Webern, and Messiaen. For the period after the Second World War the authors have chosen examples of what is new from a notational point of view in works by Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Riley, and Cardew.

Score Reading (Twentieth-Century Music)

Barry, Malcolm

Oxford University Press Music

Oxford Music Examination Workbooks: Aural Analysis: Cassette and Answer Book (Oxford Music Examination Workbooks)

Duffy, Celia

Oxford University Press

Each entry in this New Grove series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed. These unique books compile the meticulously researched articles into organized narratives, designed to make finding information as easy as possible without sacrificing readability. Each volume is completely up-to-date, and includes a suggested listening guide and an eight-page glossy insert containing relevant illustrations. Each volume is a must-own for lovers of opera and classical music. Giuseppe Verdi is the most famous Italian composer of opera. While he was sometimes criticized for writing music considered too "simple," his works have endured, and are still performed throughout the world today. This concise volume is a handy guide to the Verdi's life and operas, revising the original New Grove articles and adding a new introduction, a new section on modern Verdi productions, and an updated bibliography.

The New Grove Guide to Verdi and His Operas (New Grove Operas)

Each entry in this New Grove series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed. These unique books compile the meticulously researched articles into organized narratives, designed to make finding information as easy as possible without sacrificing readability. Each volume is completely up-to-date, and includes a suggested listening guide and an eight-page glossy insert containing relevant illustrations. Each volume is a must-own for lovers of opera and classical music. Giuseppe Verdi is the most famous Italian composer of opera. While he was sometimes criticized for writing music considered too "simple," his works have endured, and are still performed throughout the world today. This concise volume is a handy guide to the Verdi's life and operas, revising the original New Grove articles and adding a new introduction, a new section on modern Verdi productions, and an updated bibliography.

A bold, engaging exploration of opera’s fundamental nature and enduring appeal, from the sixteenth century to the present.A History of Opera, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation, provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel, and Mozart to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera’s social, political, and literary backgrounds, its economic cicumstances, and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions―between words and music, character and singer―that have always sustained and enlivened opera. In a polemical final chapter, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works―once opera’s lifeblood―have shrunk to a tiny minority and have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire. Yet the book’s message is one of celebration. Even if the majority of opera’s most popular and enduring works were written in what is now a remote European past and in circumstances very different from our own, and even if the viability of contemporary opera is ever more in question, opera as an art form remains extraordinarily buoyant and challenging. It continues to transform people physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and to articulate human experience in ways no other art form can match. 24 pages of illustrations, including four-color

A History of Opera

W.W.Norton&Company

“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”―Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer― physically, emotionally, intellectually―with its enduring power. 24 pages of illustrations

Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers’ revisions, singers’ improvisations, and stage directors’ re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some of our best-loved musical works. It looks at opera's history of multiple visions and revisions and asks a simple question: what exactly is opera? Remaking the Song, rich in imaginative answers, considers works by Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Berio in order to challenge what many regard as sacroscant: the opera’s musical text. Scholarly tradition favors the idea of great operatic texts permanently inscribed in the canon. Roger Parker, considering examples ranging from Cecilia Bartoli's much-criticized insistence on using Mozart's alternative arias in the Marriage of Figaro to Luciano Berio's new ending to Puccini's unfinished Turandot, argues that opera is an inherently mutable form, and that all of us―performers, listeners, scholars―should celebrate operatic revisions as a way of opening works to contemporary needs and new pleasures.

Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (Volume 13) (Ernest Bloch Lectures)

Graphic Design

University of California Press

This guide presents a unique collection of critical, analytical, and documentary essays on Puccini's most popular opera. There are new studies on the background to Parisian bohemianism (by Jerrold Seigel), on Puccini's musical language (by William Drabkin), and on the opera's stage history (by William Ashbrook). Following research in Italian archives, and a thorough study of the published sources (many of them previously unknown to modern scholarship), the editors have added further essays on the genesis of the opera, the structure of the libretto, and aspects of the work's reception. The book also contains a brief study of Puccini's working methods as seen through the autograph score, a full synopsis, discography, many illustrations, and an appendix of related documents (some published in English for the first time).

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Groos, Arthur

Cambridge University Press

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Parker, Roger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Parker, Roger

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Parker, Roger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years

Score Reading (Twentieth-Century Music)

Oxford Music Examination Workbooks: Aural Analysis: Cassette and Answer Book (Oxford Music Examination Workbooks)

The New Grove Guide to Verdi and His Operas (New Grove Operas)

The New Grove Guide to Verdi and His Operas (New Grove Operas)

A History of Opera

A History of Opera

Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (Volume 13) (Ernest Bloch Lectures)

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème