| Description |
xiii, 239 pages : illustrations, portraits, tables ; 23 cm |
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text txt rdacontent |
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unmediated n rdamedia |
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volume nc rdacarrier |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-225) and index. |
| Contents |
Childhood -- Serious studies -- The land where lemons blossom -- Paris at last! -- Superstar status -- A brief interlude in Berlin -- Two comic operas -- An unexpected end -- Meyerbeer's music -- Meyerbeer the man -- The falling star -- Meyerbeer and anti-Semitism -- The case of Richard Wagner -- Meyerbeer in Israel -- Finale -- Appendix 1: early Meyerbeer recordings -- Appendix 2: Palestine opera productions -- An annotated bibliography. |
| Summary |
When Giacomo Meyerbeer died in 1864 at the age of seventy-two, he was widely regarded as having written the greatest operas since Mozart. And yet, remarkably, his fame and his very name were all but eliminated from the history of music for approximately a hundred years. Who did the dastardly deed? Each for his own reasons, the principal culprits were Schumann, Mendelssohn, Heine, and Wagner. David Faiman presents here an outline of Meyerbeer's life: his precocious childhood in Prussia, his rise to fame in Italy, his reluctant achievement of superstar status in Paris, the jealousy this engendered among some of his less successful colleagues, and the way one of the above-mentioned availed himself of the latent anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century audiences to remove Meyerbeer's works from our stages and airbrush his very name from our awareness. |
| Subject |
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 1791-1864.
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Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 1791-1864 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Composers -- France -- Biography.
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| ISBN |
9789657023150 paperback |
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9657023157 paperback |
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