Intelligent and entertaining—a treat for opera aficionados and newcomers alike.
Full-scale portrait of an art form compiled from thumbnail sketches across four centuries.
This close-up approach turns out to be an excellent way to spotlight key moments in the history of opera, although music writer Rose (Berlioz Remembered, 2001, etc.) modestly aspires only “to re-create as nearly as possible the circumstances in which fifteen individual masterpieces have been put together.” Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, created in the early days of a new genre, “achieved for the first time in history the fusion of drama, text and music that was always to be at the heart of opera.” Gluck’s Alceste restored the balance in that fusion by taming the vocal excesses of Italian opera, paving the way for later masterpieces like Berlioz’s Les Troyens. The radical harmonic and thematic structure of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde “led progressively but inexorably” to Schoenberg’s atonalism and to challenging 20th-century works like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The personal stories are marvelous: music publisher Giulio Ricordi scheming to put together an aging, cranky Verdi with Young Turk Arrigo Boito to create Otello; the horrified manager in Paris, confronted with Bizet’s groundbreaking Carmen, declaring, “Death at the Opéra-Comique!...such a thing has never happened…do you hear, never!” When Rose writes, “There is no more human opera than The Marriage of Figaro,” he is identifying the characteristic that for him defines opera even more than great orchestrations or spectacular vocalizing: the creation of great characters whose inner lives and connections to our common emotions are made palpable in music. Based on a series of radio programs that originally aired on the BBC, these renderings let us hear the unmediated voices of the composers, librettists and others by drawing on letters, memoirs and other primary documents to bring to vivid life the process of making art.
Intelligent and entertaining—a treat for opera aficionados and newcomers alike.Pub Date: March 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06043-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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