Ernest Newman – författare

In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose."This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way."--Robert Bailey, New York University

Thirty Years'' Musical Recollections, first published in 1862, is a year-by-year commentary on the European operas, ballets, singers and dancers popular in London from 1830 to 1859. Its author was music critic of The Athaneum for over thirty years and also wrote book reviews, novels, plays and poems. Volume 2 covers the period 1847–1859 and serves as a valuable reference work to the musical life of London during these years. It begins with an account of the deterioration of Her Majesty''s Theatre and the opening of the Royal Italian Opera. Chorley intersperses discerning observations about the changing trends in public taste with descriptions of famous opera singers – including Mademoiselle Alboni, Signor Ronconi, the Countess Rossi, Madame Ristori and Madame Pauline Viardot – and highlights their more noteworthy performances. The book is an entertaining eyewitness account of the lively musical scene in mid-nineteenth-century London.

Excerpt: . . . Composition, it is rather curious that while I was writing on our too great readiness to admire everything a classic does, merely because he is a classic, someone in the Times Literary Supplement should have been regarding much the same fallacy--more particularly in poetry and painting--from a slightly different point of view. The thesis of the Times writer is that at this or that stage in every art, professionalism--by which he means the mere way of saying things that a period or a single master has made easy, irrespective of the value of the things that are being said--is apt to get the upper hand of inspiration. Art implies the more or less traditional manipulation of a medium, for no man can begin writing or painting or making music as if he had never read a book or seen a picture or heard a score; and there always comes a stage at which the medium is manipulated in merely professional fashion, at the expense of the higher faculty of personal invention. Examples of this process are to be found in the greatest artists: the Times writer cites, among others, Titian, Tintoretto, Shakespeare, and Beethoven. One result of this professionalism, he goes on to say, is that it spoils not only the artist but the public, that comes to identify difficulty of handling with inm spiration, and is inclined to think too little of the art that is simple, direct, and unencumbered with the visible apparatus of manufacture. The public sees the grand manner in many a passage of Shakespeare or Milton that is the merest platitude phrased with professional pomposity; while it looks down on art so artless as that of Blake in his simpler lyrics . . .

This book contains the definitive treatment of the stories, texts, and music of Turandot, Gianni Schicchi, The Barber of Bagdad, Thaïs, Eugen Onegin, Prince Igor, The Golden Cockerel, Elektra, Orfeo ed Euridice, Lakmé, Les Huguenots, Così fan tutte, The Seraglio, Les Troyens, Don Pasquale, La Juive, Manon, Falstaff, Louise, Pelléas and Mélisande, The Bartered Bride, Die Fledermaus, Romeo and Juliet, Der Rosenkavalier, Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, Wozzeck, L’Heure Espagnole, and Boris Godounov. The foremost authority on opera presented in the comprehensive volume all that the opera-goer, radio listener, music-lover, and confirmed operamane will wish to know about them. It is unique as both guide and armchair companion. Ernest Newman’s gigantic grasp of his subject is clear at every turn, as are his sheer writing ability and wit. He larded his treatment of the operas with biographical and historical materials acquired in a long lifetime of study and writing. This is the first volume of the trilogy of books (the other two being The Wagner Operas and Seventeen Famous Operas) with which Ernest Newman wished to replace his much earlier book, Stories of the Great Operas.

“The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.” –Ernest Newman In Seventeen Famous Operas, renowned musicologist and music critic Ernest Newman goes beyond simply retelling the plots of the operas he has chosen to feature in this volume. Because for Newman, opera was theater—and he demonstrates that with his in-depth studies of the seventeen featured operas. Newman uses biographical, literary, and historical background to expose the reader to how each featured work came to be. These featured works include La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, La Traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, The Barber of Seville, The Magic Flute and ten other famous works. Seventeen Famous Operas is a must-read for music librarians, opera lovers, and propagandists of music everywhere.