New opera resource features Southampton scholars
Scholars from Music at Southampton figure prominently in a major new resource for opera studies, Oxford Handbook of Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
The book includes chapters by Valeria De Lucca on patronage, William Drabkin on analysing opera, Mark Everist on rehearsal practices, and Francesco Izzo on censorship.
Edited by The New England Conservatory’s Helen Greenwald, a frequent visitor to the Department of Music at the University, OHO consists of 50 chapters and over 1200 pages that attempts to answer the question ‘What is Opera’. OHO responds to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. It casts opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: "Words, Music, and Meaning"; "Performance and Production"; "Opera and Society"; and "Transmission and Reception".