"Includes full-length Harmonia Mundi CD"--Cover, p. 1.

This book explores the role of the ubiquitous nurse character found in over one hundred operas and provides insight into opera nurses’ unique musical and dramatic journey from servant to sister, and women’s perceived place and status on the opera stage and in society.

The first comprehensive attempt to map the current field of opera studies by leading scholars in the discipline.

These five biographies provide the first complete survey of Italian opera from the early buffo operas of Rossini to Verdi's great masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff, and the verismo operas of Puccini. Andrew Porter has been highly praised for his original and enlightening account of Verdi, and Philip Gossett has received similar acclaim for his treatment of Rossini. Porter, Gossett, William Ashbrooke, Julian Budden, Mosco Carner, and Friedrich Lippmann, all acknowledged experts in the field of Italian opera, combine to offer insight into the traditions and workings of one of the most fascinating periods in the history of opera. Book jacket.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics can shed new light on Monteverdi’s two Venetian operas (and their respective librettos, by Badoaro and Busenello), not only at the levels of textual criticism, historical exegesis, and dramaturgy, but also with regard to concrete choices of performance, staging, and mise-en-scène. Following an Introduction setting up the interdisciplinary agenda, the volume comprises two main parts: ‘Contexts and Sources’ deals with the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts of the works - librettos and scores; 'Performance and Interpretation’ offers critical and historical insights regarding the casting, singing, reciting, staging, and conducting of the two operas. This volume will appeal to scholars and researchers in Opera Studies and Music History as well as be of interest to early music performers and all those involved with presenting opera on stage.

In Ticket to the Opera, Phil G. Goulding finally makes the magic and mystique of opera accessible to all. Here he offers a complete operatic education, including history, definitions of key musical terms, opera lore and gossip, portraits of famous singers and the roles they immortalized, as well as pithy introductions to the greatest operas of Europe and America and their composers. The book's centerpiece is what Goulding terms "the collection"--85 classics, among them Aida, The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and Madama Butterfly, that have been packing the world's opera houses for years. This entertaining, meticulously researched book also includes a fascinating chapter on American opera from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess to Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and a discussion of the gems of twentieth-century opera featuring works like Leos Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Alban Berg's Lulu, and Serge Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. Whether you're a curious neophyte, a music lover interested in branching out, or an aficionado eager to compare notes with a brilliant fellow opera buff, you'll prize Ticket to the Opera as an essential volume in your music library.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.