...Monica Pearl discusses the pleasures of opera, exploring through her own long immersion as an aficionado a new poetics through which we might understand the experience of bliss which is peculiar to this art form. Here language is somehow not enough, or not adequate. And yet, of course, we must...

..., photography and television soap opera both conform with – and deviate from – traditional visions of this Mediterranean metropolis. It argues that Marseille has increasingly been deployed as a means by which to showcase ethnic diversity in contemporary France and French visual culture. A bout de souffle film...

...This section deals with the immense difficulties of trying to set up a four part series covering the social history of opera. It documents the origin of the idea, and the exploration of setting up the project as co-production between three countries. Though many people show an initial enthusiasm...

... cultural models. Belgium boundaries national social physical Brussels concert hall consumers elite language national identity opera house privilege public sphere sociability theatre travel ler ambition appropriation Austria capital cities competition court education The Netherlands...

... and opera also made him one of the greatest metteurs en scène of the cinema: he imitated realities and brought them to life on stage or in front of a camera, putting them ‘in scene’, not exactly documenting them so much as spectacularising them, transfiguring them. This apparent opposition...

...While location realism would seem to predominate in the 2010s, live drama continues to be popular in the form of ‘one-off’ specials and ‘event’ television. Special anniversary episodes of soap operas EastEnders (BBC, 1985- ) and Coronation Street (ITV, 1960...

..., via Italy, France and even Germany. The fourth chapter explores ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in the native form of dramatic opera in John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (1699), with music by John Eccles, and in the through-sung Italianate...

...This chapter deals primarily with the earlier part of McGovern’s career both within established genre such as soap opera and the crime series and then into his first authored series with a strong autobiographical basis, Hearts and Minds and The Lakes. The chapter...

...This chapter analyses the opera Bählamms Fest (1994–98, recorded 2003), a collaborative work by composer Olga Neuwirth and librettist Elfriede Jelinek, based on a little-known play by Leonora Carrington. Neuwirth's Arbeitsjournal (Working Diary) provides contexts for reading the opera...

...Despite experiments in the 1650s, through-sung opera failed to gain a firm foothold in Restoration England. Explanations for this circumstance have focussed on English taste, the finances of London’s theatre companies, and the popularity of native ‘dramatick opera’. While these were obstacles...