Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition of The Complete Opera Book - The Stories of the Operas, together with 400 of the Leading - Airs and Motives in Musical Notation. It was previously published by other bona fide publishers, and is now, after many years, back in print. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Gustav Kobbé, which is now, at last, again available to you.
Get the PDF and EPUB NOW as well. Included in your purchase you have The Complete Opera Book - The Stories of the Operas, together with 400 of the Leading - Airs and Motives in Musical Notation in EPUB AND PDF format to read on any tablet, eReader, desktop, laptop or smartphone simultaneous - Get it NOW.
Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Complete Opera Book - The Stories of the Operas, together with 400 of the Leading - Airs and Motives in Musical Notation:
Look inside the book:
But when you are told that the Grand Opéra, Paris, was founded by Lully, an Italian composer, in 1672; that Italians were writing operas nearly a century earlier; that a German, Reinhard Keiser (1679-1739), is known to have composed at least 116 operas; and that another German, Johann Adolph Hasse, composed among his operas, numbering at least a hundred, one entitled 'Artaxerxes, ' two airs from which were sung by Carlo Broschi every evening for ten years to soothe King Philip V. of Spain;-you will realize that opera existed, and even flourished before Gluck produced his 'Orpheus and Eurydice.' ...Indeed, throughout the history of opera, there have been recurring periods, when it has become necessary for composers with the true interest of the lyric stage at heart, to restore the proper balance between the creator of a work and its interpreters, in other words to prevent opera from degenerating from a musical drama of truly dramatic significance to a mere framework for the display of vocal pyrotechnics. ...It is then that Orpheus intones the lament, 'Che farò senza Euridice' (I have lost my Eurydice), that air in the score which has truly become immortal and by which Gluck, when the opera as a whole shall have disappeared from the stage, will still be remembered.
About Gustav Kobbé, the Author:
Gustav Kobbé (4 March 1857 - 27 July 1918) was an American music critic and author, best known for his guide to the operas, The Complete Opera Book, first published (posthumously) in the United States in 1919 and the United Kingdom in 1922. ...6 His hobby was sailing, and it was while he was out in the Great South Bay off Bay Shore, New York, in July 1918, that a seaplane, coming down for a landing, struck his boat and killed him instantly.
