In 1935, the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad made her United States debut in a live radio broadcast that went across the country and made her an overnight success. Flagstad went on to enjoy an astounding career at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming one of the most well-known singers of the twentieth century. The Voice of the Century tells ......
In 1935, the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad made her United States debut in a live radio broadcast that went across the country and made her an overnight success. Flagstad went on to enjoy an astounding career at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming one of the most well-known singers of the twentieth century. The Voice of the Century tells ......
Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond
In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese opera theater arrived as one of the significant performing art forms in California. Nancy Yunhwa Rao excavates and contextualizes the important history of Chinese Opera Theater, bringing to light the ways it became woven into the financial, political, social, and family life in California and beyond. ......
One of the most innovative composers of his generation, Mikel Rouse is known for a trilogy of operas that includes Dennis Cleveland and a gift for superimposing pop vernaculars onto avant-garde music. This memoir channels Rouse's high energy personality into an exuberant account of the precarity and pleasures of artistic creation. Raconteur and ......
Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill's music could not be repeated. Weill's works for the stage nevertheless set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. In Weill, Blitzstein, Bernstein, distinguished musicologist Rebecca Schmid explores how Weill's formal innovations laid the groundwork for ......
In 1759 the court of the Italian Duchy of Parma adopted the inspiration of cultural creators who recommended a reform of Italian opera along French lines. These writers favored combining Italian-style music with the wider range of musical genres and scenic variety of French opera. As the prize-winning music critic and commentator George W. Loomis ......
Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-three operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted ......
"In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social justice. OPERA welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique-and always, beautiful ......