A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years - Hardcover

Abbate, Carolyn; Parker, Roger

4.17

305 ratings by Goodreads

9780713996333: A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713996331 ISBN 13: 9780713996333

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2012

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This definitive work tells the entire story of the world's most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Opera paints the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, 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 background, its economic circumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were once opera's life-blood - have shrunk to a tiny minority, have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire.

Yet the book's final message is one of celebration. 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.

'[T]his is the best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority and readability' - Times Literary Supplement

'Their fantastically clear-sighted and down-to-earth history focuses on what opera is and was rather than what it should be or would like to have been. Their virtuosic spring-clean of opera's past reveals an art form quite different to the one that we come across today' - Daily Telegraph

'Parker and Abbate have written a highly idiosyncratic and personal history of opera. [It] has a brio, insouciance, and even irreverence that are very much their own' - New Republic

'[F]resh, brave, challenging and, above all, useful' - Literary Review

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Review:

Essential reading for all who love this most ambitious of art forms. --Daniel Snowman, author of The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera

This book is not only a total delight to read, but its insights are so varied, its arguments so wonderfully precise and unpredictable, its prose so generous and engaging, that it is an utter delight to re-read. --David J. Levin, executive editor, Opera Quarterly

An extended duet of intertwined voices, this inspiring book is at once a history of opera and a poetic meditation on the genre itself, its complexity, depth, and allure. --Ellen Rosand, George A. Saden Professor of Music, Yale University

A revealing genealogy of a living tradition that will speak vividly to those who continue to fall for opera's mad charms, and entice those who might be about to. --Christopher Morris, author of Reading Opera Between the Lines

Experts and beginners alike will enjoy what is sure to become a classic work. --Andrew Moravcsik, director, European Union Program, Princeton University

There's reason to applaud a new volume like...A History of Opera, in which vast scholarly authority is put to the service of a narrative both lucid and sweeping. --Jeremy Eichler

Unfailingly intelligent ...their coverage of every period in opera's history is scrupulous and provocative.

[A History of Opera] will surely become essential reading for anyone seeking an engaging and highly informed chronicle of the great composers and their works. --Daniel Snowman

Parker and Abbate have written ... a highly idiosyncratic and personal history of opera. [It] has a brio, insouciance, and even irreverence that are very much their own. --G.W. Bowersock

[F]resh... brave, challenging and, above all, useful.

About the Author:

Carolyn Abbate is Professor of Music at Harvard University and the author of Unsung Voices (1991) and In Search of Opera (2001). As well as about opera, she writes on philosophy, music as performance, ephemeral art, and film and sound technology. Her work has been translated into many languages. She is herself a translator, most recently of Vladimir Jank�l�vitch's La musique et l'ineffable, and has been involved in theatre, as a dramaturge and director.

Roger Parker is Professor of Music at King's College, London, and the author of Leonora's Last Act (1997) and Remaking the Song (2006). He writes particularly Italian opera of the nineteenth century. He is founding co-editor of the Donizetti critical edition, published by Ricordi, and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (1994).

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