A comprehensive guide to CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA and I PAGLIACCI, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto of each opera with Italian/English side-by side, and over 60 music highlight examples.

Short-listed for the 2002 Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research In the seventy years since 1931, various organizations large and small, including several semi-private ones, have issued or re-issued various original 78 rpm recordings from original metal plates. No comprehensive listing of these has ever before appeared; this is the first, and gathers together all the various information of ongoing interest. This is a most important addition to the record-collecting bibliography.

Expertly arranged vocal score for "Cavalleria Rusticana," An Opera in One Act with Italian and English text.

The world's defiinitive single volume of opera reference including: full plot synopses, cast lists, singers, composers, literary and social history, recordings, and much more. Covers over 250 operas performed over the last quarter-century, additional works selected for interest, merit, or historical significance, 64 pages of color plates, 100 black-and-white photographs, fully cross-referenced with indexes and a glossary.

Opera recordings have been with us since the creation of the first wax cylinders. Now at a time when the 25-year reign of the compact disc appears to be coming to an end is the moment to take stock of the history of recordings of arguably the most popular composer of operas, Giacomo Puccini. In Giacomo Puccini: A Discography, librarian and music historian Roger Flury looks at each opera chronologically from Le Villi to Turandot, followed by sections on Puccini's instrumental, chamber, orchestral, and solo vocal works. Details of each complete opera are listed by recording date, followed by excerpts in the order in which they occur in the opera. Recordings of each aria are listed alphabetically by the name of the artist. For ease of use, Flury establishes as the main criteria for inclusion those recordings assigned a commercial issue number and available for purchase. This book does not limit itself to mainstream recordings but includes as well 'unofficial' recordings taken from broadcasts or illegally recorded in theaters, ensuring that the audio recording history of Puccini is free of gaps. (Video and DVD issues, whether of staged performances or excerpts in concert, are not included unless they have been issued in a sound-only format.) This volume brings together information on nearly 10,000 recordings of Puccini's music. It provides a comprehensive overview of the recorded history of the composer's works and serves as a useful guide for the transfer of recordings from one format to another.

Just twenty-six when the electrifying premiere of his Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome catapulted the impoverished musician into sudden fame and fortune, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) went on to write fifteen more operas, including L'Amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Iris, Parisina, and Il Piccolo Marat. With privileged access to extensive primary sources, including Mascagni's 4,200 letters to Anna Lolli, his mistress for more than three decades, author Alan Mallach provides a compelling portrait of a flamboyant, combative, and emotional man who was passionately devoted to the Italian opera tradition and committed to innovation in musical language and dramatic form. Deftly combining serious biography with critical commentary, Mallach begins with the captivating story of Mascagni's rags-to-riches adventure, from his birth in Livorno in Tuscany, to his musical studies first with Alfredo Soffredini and later at the Milan Conservatory, to his years as a vagabond musician, to the worldwide success of his breakthrough opera. He then traces Mascagni's private and professional life after Cavalleria, examining a prolific yet controversial career that was forever overshadowed by the work that unexpectedly thrust him into the limelight. Mallach provides a full analysis of Mascagni's oeuvre and discusses his complex relationships with such Italian cultural and political figures as Edoardo Sonzogno, Giacomo Puccini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Illica, and Benito Mussolini. He also thoroughly chronicles Mascagni's bouts with manic depression, his marriage to Lina and devotion to their three children, his grueling schedule of concert and operatic tours, his patriotism and bitter opposition to Italy's involvement in both world wars, and his passionate love affair with Anna Lolli. This richly textured biography will appeal to fans of the still beloved and popular Cavalleria, and it will introduce opera enthusiasts to the power, intensity, and melodic beauty of the brilliant composer's many other significant works.

The Italians were so busy creating and performing superb music that they neglected to tell the great epic story of their wondrous achievement. With BRAVO! we hope to tell that story. The 1,000-year-old story begins, basically, with the work of a humble monk from the city of Arezzo. And this story has no ending. If, on one hand, we will never know the music of the Egyptians, of the Greeks, and of the Romans, on the other, we have come to know and to enjoy the music of every composer from the 12th Century to the Present day thanks to Guido's invention of the musical scale. As the story unfolds, we are rewarded with the many convincing superlatives forever tied to Italian musical endeavors. The first ten chapters deal with the Italian musical geniuses who theorized, made superb instruments, composed, performed, orchestrated, conducted and sang for the enjoyment of listeners worldwide, and the closing chapter gives a comprehensive look at the beautiful things that have happened in the Italian and American world of music. While each page of BRAVO! is full of surprising and fascinating details, the title reminds us that the term, BRAVO! is reserved only for topnotch performances. Book jacket.

Conductors John Yaffé and David Daniels have created a one-stop sourcebook for orchestras, opera companies, conductors, and librarians who research and/or prepare programs of vocal excerpts—such as solos, ensembles, and choruses—for concert performance. In this book, readers will find detailed information on a vast repertoire of vocal pieces commonly extracted from operas, operettas, musicals, and oratorios—more than 1,750 excerpts from 450 parent works. Modeled on Daniels’ Orchestral Music, Arias, Ensembles, & Choruses includes basic historical details about each parent work as well as extract titles, subtitles, voice types, keys, durations, locations in the original work (with page numbers in both full scores and piano-vocal scores), and exact instrumentation. It also lists the publishers that make available the orchestral materials for just the excerpt being programmed, independent of the full parent work. Until now, conductors and orchestra librarians commonly had to first leaf through full scores, searching for one elusive three-minute aria after another, only to then consult multiple publishers' catalogues to compile crucial information on all the excerpts proposed for a concert or recording. This book constitutes a single source for finding that information. In many cases, the individual entries include valuable insider information on common performance practice, including start- and stop-points, transpositions, and conventional cuts. Searching for repertoire is made easy with the detailed title index and appendixes devoted to ensemble excerpts, all categorized by personnel (e.g., duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, choruses) and language (Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian). This book is the ideal tool for the working conductor and orchestral librarian, as well as music program directors at colleges and conservatories, opera companies, and symphony orchestras. As of October 2015, a new printing of this book has occurred to correct errors in the index. A PDF version of the new index is available to previous purchasers of the volume. Please contact Rowman & Littlefield's music editor for assistance.