Actors know about "falling up": a split-second ignition from the wings, propelling entrance as a new character, an unwilled ascent to a different mode of being, an in-body experience that overlays preparation, opportunity, choice, or chance. Falling Up, the first and only full-length Floyd study, is a metaphor for humanity’s uncanny ability to rise from seeming disaster into rebirth. Floyd’s consistent succession of soars, stumbles, slides, or wrenches sings of triumph over odds. A modern Renaissance man, Floyd is our greatest living opera composer and librettist, a trained concert pianist, a master stage director, and a teacher. In Falling Up, Holliday offers an intimate account of the life that shaped the words and music. Combining insights from hundreds of interviews with Floyd, his family, and many of the last half-century’s greatest singers, conductors, and opera administrators, Falling Up traces Floyd’s Southern roots and the struggles and sacrifices that accompanied his rise to operatic stardom. With more than forty photographs, the detailed evolution of Floyd’s fourteen operas, and in-depth analysis of his nonoperatic works, Falling Up is essential reading for opera fans and professionals alike, a book that moves, informs, and entertains.

Now in paperback, Inventing the Child is a highly entertaining, humorous, and at times acerbic account of what it means to be a child (and a parent) in America at the dawn of the new millennium. J. Zornado explores the history and development of the concept of childhood, starting with the works of Calvin, Freud, and Rousseau and culminating with the modern 'consumer' childhood of Dr. Spock and television. The volume discusses major media depictions of childhood and examines the ways in which parents use different forms of media to swaddle, educate, and entertain their children. Zornado argues that the stories we tell our children contain the ideologies of the dominant culture - which, more often than not, promote 'happiness' at all costs, materialism as the way to happiness, and above all, obedience to the dominant order.

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it—his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

This book traces the historical roots of Western culture's stories of childhood in which the child is subjugated to the adult. Going back 400 years, it looks again at Hamlet, fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Walt Disney cartoons. Inventing the Child is a highly entertaining, humorous, and at times acerbic account of what it means to be a child (and a parent) in America at the dawn of the new millennium. John Zornado explores the history and development of the concept of childhood, starting with the works of Calvin, Freud, and Rousseau and culminating with the modern "consumer" childhood of Dr. Spock and television. The volume discusses major media depictions of childhood and examines the ways in which parents use different forms of media to swaddle, educate, and entertain their children. Zornado argues that the stories we tell our children contain the ideologies of the dominant culture--which, more often than not, promote "happiness" at all costs, materialism as the way to happiness, and above all, obedience to the dominant order.