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The Oxford Handbook of Opera

Online ISBN:
9780199984299
Print ISBN:
9780195335538
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Opera

Helen M. Greenwald (ed.)
Helen M. Greenwald
(ed.)
Music History & Musicology, New England Conservatory of Music
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Helen Greenwald has taught at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1991, and was Visiting Professor in the Music Department at the University of Chicago in 2008. Her numerous articles on vocal music of the 18th – 20th centuries have appeared in 19th-Century Music, Acta Musicologica, Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Mozart-Jahrbuch, Cambridge Opera Journal, and the Salzburger Akademische Beiträge. She is the editor of the critical edition of Verdi's Attila (Chicago/Milan, 2012), which was premiered 2010 by Riccardo Muti in his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, and the co-editor (with Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell) of the critical edition of Rossini's Zelmira (Pesaro, Italy, 2005), premiered (2009) by Robert Abbado at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, with Juan Diego Flórez in the role of Ilo, and recently released on DVD (Decca, 2012). She writes regularly for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera.

Published online:
7 April 2015
Published in print:
5 November 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199984299
Print ISBN:
9780195335538
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Opera offers a series of trenchant essays on the most important and compelling issues confronting those who think and write about opera. The handbook emphasizes not only operas themselves, but such broad concerns of the discipline as genre, voice, national style, performance, censorship, staging, film, editions, and aesthetics. In doing so, the volume captures the breadth, direction, and tone of opera studies, and most especially its methodologies. The handbook organizes fifty contributions into eight large divisions: Foundations, The Libretto, Production, Performance, Opera and Society, Criticizing Opera, Transmission and Reception, and a postlude about contemporary opera and the future of opera. Each section is designed to reflect the systematic and humanistic concerns of scholars as they juxtapose historical and critical approaches to the issues. The postlude is concerned with the multiplicity of ideas about opera in the culture of atonality and technology, opera absent what the Italians call vocalità, opera in an age that wants to remake the repertoire in its own image, and the opera of the future. The Oxford Handbook of Opera emphasizes criticism and analysis, but also the complex relationship between scholarship and performance as well as the emotionally-charged dynamic between opera and its audience.

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