Wendy Heller – författare

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.

Anthology for Music in the Baroque, part of the Western Music in Context series, is the ideal companion to Music in the Baroque. Twenty-six carefully chosen works—including a lute song by John Dowland, a cantata by Barbara Strozzi, and selections from J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue—offer representative examples of genres and composers of the period. Commentaries following each score present a careful analysis of the music, and online links to purchase and download recordings make listening easier than ever.

Wendy Heller's Music in the Baroque traces the production and consumption of music in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Going beyond a history of styles, the text explores patronage, education, religious and civic ritual, theater, and visual culture. Heller focuses not only on the nature of music in the Baroque period, but also on the very different ways in which men and women experienced music in their daily lives. Treating music as an expression of political and national identity, she examines it in the context of the era's art and literature, political and religious conflicts, and contentious issues of class and gender.Western Music in Context: A Norton History comprises six volumes of moderate length, each written in an engaging style by a recognized expert. Authoritative and current, the series examines music in the broadest sense—as sounds notated, performed, and heard—focusing not only on composers and works, but also on broader social and intellectual currents.

Opera developed during a time when the position of women--their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality--was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera.The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts--by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus--form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

Renowned as both a singer and composer, Barbara Strozzi was among the most accomplished and prolific composers of vocal chamber music in the seventeenth century. Her works, which have become increasingly popular in concert and recordings in recent decades, are remarkable for their musical sophistication and extraordinary range of expression-humor, irony, eroticism, pathos, and religious devotion. The adopted daughter of the poet Giulio Strozzi and mother of four children, Barbara Strozzi (who might have been a courtesan) was also for a time a participant in Venice's vibrant libertine intellectual and artistic world. This first English-language volume to focus on the composer brings together invited essays by an international group of scholars from diverse disciplines to explore Strozzi's life, her music, and the complex world she inhabited. Chapters focus not only on Strozzi, but also on other prominent women of the time, and on other issues including financial questions and matters of sexuality.

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.