Book description
Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the
last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently
unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint 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 cicumstances
and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its
development through the centuries. Central to the book is an
exploration of the tensions that have always sustained and enlivened
opera. 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. Even if the
majority of opera's most popular and enduring works were written in
what is now a remote European past, in circumstances very different
from our own, and 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.
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).
