Since its premiere in 1791, The Magic Flute has been staged continuously and remains, to this day, Mozart's most-performed opera worldwide. This comprehensive, user-friendly, up-to-date critical guide considers the opera in a variety of contexts to provide a fresh look at a work that has continued to fascinate audiences from Mozart's time to ours. It serves both as an introduction for those encountering the opera for the first time and as a treasury of recent scholarship for those who know it very well. Containing twenty-one essays by leading scholars, and drawing on recent research and commentary, this Companion presents original insights on music, dialogue, and spectacle, and offers a range of new perspectives on key issues, including the opera's representation of exoticism, race, and gender. Organized in four sections – historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches, and reception – it provides an essential framework for understanding The Magic Flute and its extraordinary afterlife.

This Companion to Schubert examines the career, music, and reception of one of the most popular yet misunderstood and elusive composers. Sixteen chapters by leading Schubert scholars make up three parts. The first seeks to situate the social, cultural, and musical climate in which Schubert lived and worked, the second surveys the scope of his musical achievement, and the third charts the course of his reception from the perceptions of his contemporaries to the assessments of posterity. Myths and legends about Schubert the man are explored critically and the full range of his musical accomplishment is examined.

This wide-ranging guide offers insights for musicians and students on how to be a composer.

An innovative resource which shatters tango stereotypes to account for the genre's impact on arts, culture, and society around the world. Twenty chapters by North and South American, European, and Asian contributors, some publishing in English for the first time, collectively cover tango's history, culture, and performance practice.

Exploring a diverse, distinguished repertoire, and transcending the rhetoric of neglect, this book transforms understanding of women composers.

Featuring fascinating accounts from practitioners, this Companion examines how developments in recording have transformed musical culture.

Sixteen original essays by leading scholars on Mary Shelley's novel provide an introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts.

"Premiered in 1791, The Magic Flute remains Mozart's most-performed opera worldwide. This Companion covers historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches and reception history, and engages with current debates including the representation of gender, race and exoticism. It provides an essential framework for understanding the opera today"--

This Companion has long been a standard introduction to the field. This second edition is updated and enhanced with four new chapters, addressing the key themes being researched, taught and studied in modernism. Its interdisciplinary approach is central to its success as it brings together readings of the many varieties of modernism. Chapters address the major literary genres, the intellectual, religious and political contexts, and parallel developments in film, painting and music. The catastrophe of the First World War, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, the conflict among classes: the essays show how these events and circumstances shaped aesthetic and literary experiments. In doing so, they explain clearly both the precise formal innovations in language, image, scene and tone, and the broad historical conditions of a movement that aspired to transform culture.

Comprehensive and accessible, this Companion addresses several well-known themes in the study of Franklin and his writings, while also showing Franklin in conversation with his British and European counterparts in science, philosophy, and social theory. Specially commissioned chapters, written by scholars well-known in their respective fields, examine Franklin's writings and his life with a new sophistication, placing Franklin in his cultural milieu while revealing the complexities of his intellectual, literary, social, and political views. Individual chapters take up several traditional topics, such as Franklin and the American dream, Franklin and capitalism, and Franklin's views of American national character. Other chapters delve into Franklin's library and his philosophical views on morality, religion, science, and the Enlightenment and explore his continuing influence in American culture. This Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of American literature, history and culture.