A01=Michael Rose
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Michael Rose
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVGC9
Category=AVLF
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780393060430
- Weight: 759g
- Dimensions: 165 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 18 Mar 2013
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers—Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation.
Rather than retreading familiar ground with pages of historical and musical analysis, Rose places each opera firmly in the context of the composer’s life and provides an engaging text in which the varied and colorful personalities involved are seen to discuss, comment, and contribute in one way or another to the progress of its composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Otello; and Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelléas et Mélisande.
Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing he captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity, and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera’s most enduring masterpieces.
Michael Rose is a musician and writer living in London. He is the author of Berlioz Remembered and the coauthor of Words about Music with John Amis. He wrote the commentary for Erich Auerbach’s Images of Music, has been a contributor to numerous publications including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and was for sixteen years the joint author with the late Hanns Hammelmann of the BBC radio series The Birth of an Opera.
