Opera in Italy Today offers a panorama of Italy's dynamic operatic scene. Descriptive text and evocative illustrations recreate not only Italy's historic major houses - including La Scala, the San Carlo, and La Fenice - but also her most important regional theaters. Ten of Italy's most famous opera festivals, including the Puccini, the Bellini, the Donizetti, and the Rossini, are discussed in detail as well, and more than twenty others are listed with address, season, and ticket information. A brief history of each opera house and venue, along with cartelloni of recent seasons, lets the opera lover know who has conducted and performed there in the past. For the armchair fan, discographies and bibliographies are provided. The book also includes a chapter on the La Scala Theatrical Museum, a chapter on children's opera, and a concluding chapter, "Opportunities for Young Singers", rich in information on Italian workshops, programs, and contests for aspiring young vocalists. Finally, lucky visitors to Italy will find the glossary of Italian words and phrases most useful during their travels.

The first full-length study of the last great era of Italian opera

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in history. She earned nearly $5,000 a night and had her own railway carriage. Yet a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Rosselli also examines the sexist prejudices against the castrati of the eighteenth century and against women singers. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdote, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.