Bøker i Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performa-serien

Emanuele Senici's new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by placing his works into the culture and society in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed.

"From the theatrical stage to the literary salon, the figure of Sappho--the ancient poet and inspiring icon of feminine creativity--played a major role in the intertwining histories of improvisation, text, and performance throughout the nineteenth century. Exploring the connections between operatic and poetic improvisation in Italy and beyond, Singing Sappho combines earwitness accounts of famous female improviser-virtuosi with erudite analysis of musical and literary practices. Esse demonstrates that performance played a much larger role in conceptions of musical authorship than previously recognized, arguing that discourses of spontaneity--specifically those surrounding the improvvisatrice, or female poetic improviser--were paradoxically used to carve out a new authority for opera composers just as improvisation itself was falling into decline"--

"With "Don Giovanni" Captured, Richard Will takes on the challenge of considering a single opera through engagement with its entire history of recorded performance, encompassing both audio recordings (starting with wax cylinders and 78s) and video recordings, from DVDs, to films, to streaming videos. Recorded opera has become a genre unto itself, connected with actual stage productions but with its own history and conventions. Today, recordings and other forms of mediation inform our experience of live opera as much as the other way around. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Mozart's Don Giovanni to sit still, and the tremendous transformation they undergo from performance to performance, and from generation to generation. By choosing an opera with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as much more than the tale of a single libertine aristocrat and as a standard-bearer for changing myths about eros and for how we socialize (and represent in performance) sexual and power relations that run the gamut from seduction, to predatoriness, to rape"--

"In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse shaped Italian cultural identity during the years before and after the country's unification in 1861. Vella sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic culture, its engagement with early technologies, and the inherent mobility of operatic productions as they physically traveled across the peninsula. Through a series of case studies, Vella explores musical criticism in the Italian press as well as specific operatic works, singers, and theatrical stagings. She also develops new tools for rethinking nineteenth-century operatic Italy by drawing inspiration from mobility studies and media archaeology. The author traces the politics of movement within and between multiple locations by attending to opera's encounters with technologies of communication and transportation, including the new railway, understood as a medium of operatic dissemination as well as a new part of opera's media infrastructure"--