(Part 2) Top products from r/opera

Hi, I created my own Wagner Opera major at Conservatory, so I'll do my best to help:

I have to say that live performance is the best way to experience the Ring, but otherwise the Solti recording is one of the best (Levine, Barenboim, and Janowski/Staatskapelle are up there too). The music is made up of leitmotivs, or musical phrases associated with characters, ideas, feelings etc. The leitmotivs constantly change based on context, and there are around 100 of them (pending on who's counting). To make sense of the opera, you need to have just a basic understanding of them. This is a good list of the more important ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcPgcaow01FUWAH-b-z6Ix7W3_7QBBjLN Don't bother memorizing them, just familiarize and listening to the operas will do the rest :)

Additionally, a basic plot understanding is useful, and the Wikipedia articles for each individual opera are sufficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Rheingold#Synopsis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Walk%C3%BCre#Synopsis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_(opera)#Synopsis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tterd%C3%A4mmerung#Synopsis

I also find that listening along to a text and translation is most effective, which you can find here:

http://www.murashev.com/opera/Richard_Wagner

There is one book I would strongly recommend to any Wagner newbie: Bryan Magee's "Aspects of Wagner." In my opinion, it is by far the best short book on Wagner. While not about the Ring itself, it covers exactly how all of Wagner's operas function (I think they are really quite different from all other opera), his concept of art, his influence, and his controversies. It should give the proper frame of mind to dig into the operas. If you really want something focused just on the Ring, however, I'd recommend M. Owen Lee's introduction. It's a slim volume with a summary, a motif index, and some commentary on the big ideas. Or, there's a nice Ring companion book put together by Barry Millington with a full text translation that also has scholarly essays on conception and context, as well as index of important leitmotivs:

https://www.amazon.com/Aspects-Wagner-Bryan-Magee/dp/0192840126

https://www.amazon.com/Wagners-Ring-Turning-Sky-Round/dp/0879101865

https://www.amazon.com/Wagners-Ring-Nibelung-Barry-Millington-ebook/dp/B00D3F94RE

Apologies for the length, I hope this was at least a little useful, and let me know if you'd like to know any more :)

Soon to be masters grad (soprano) here.

A high quality recording device can be very useful. The non-musically inclined electrical engineer boyfriend bought me a Tascam DR-05 with a small stand and case for my birthday last year. (It also came with a fun lesson from him on how sound recording works -- talk about nerd-out connection!) It is wonderfully portable and I use it all the time to record lessons, coachings, and practice sessions. Also on the tech front, the best investment I EVER made as a singer was a great set of noise canceling headphones. (I have Bose QC-15s that I bought in 2010.) They are a godsend when I am traveling for auditions and have become an integral part of shutting out the rest of the world for my pre-performance/audition routine. In terms of listening to her own voice, good headphones or speakers are pretty much a requirement since most speakers/headphones can't handle the high upper partials of the high notes in the female operatic range.

What I always, always, always want for every occasion that merits presents are books and/or scores to build my personal library. There is a good chance that she has a list of things that she would like to own and you might consider asking if you're not invested in surprising her.

Nice opera scores are always a great option. Consider looking for a hard-bound score (like Ricordi or Bärenreiter) for one of the major mezzo role operas like Carmen, Werther, or Barber of Seville. (They are not particularly cheap.) You might consider asking her singer friends what roles she might be expected to sing during her career to guide your selections.

A great song cycle for mezzo could also be a nice gift. Jake Hegie's [The Deepest Desire] (http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/the-deepest-desire-piano-vocal-score-sheet-music/19646133) is still under copyright so she wouldn't just be able to print it from a free online resource like imslp.

Reference books could also be a great idea since she's about to lose access to a lot of materials that she has probably used on a regular basis through her university. A libretto collection and the New Kobbes Opera Book are two that immediately come to mind.

A book I highly recommend for beginners is Ticket To The Opera. Mr. Goulding is himself not an expert and he makes that clear up front. But far from disqualifying him, his enthusiasm shines through on every page and that is what makes this 720-page book, despite it's depth and length, lively and informative reading. Another really neat thing about this book is that he's a former journalist who fell in love with opera late in life, so it's almost like your situation (perhaps) and definitely mine, since I also discovered opera late in life. Maybe a better way to say that is that I finally found time to sit through 3-hour Wagnerian works and enjoy them! Another neat thing is that while Goulding does give great summaries of the "greatest hits" you might expect, his extensive dive into the less heard but still outstanding operas, including many 20th century works, make his book far from simplistic.

The only other humorous approach to marketing opera that I've come across so far are a few very brief videos by Des Moines Opera. They aren't giving synopses; they're just very short promos that parody specific opera characters ...

http://www.youtube.com/user/DesMoinesMetroOpera/videos


There is also a blog about attractive baritones, which can be amusing. Search for "BariHunks blog".


There is also a handful of humorous books on opera:.

http://www.amazon.com/Tenors-Tantrums-Trills-Opera-Dictionary/dp/0920151191/ref=sr_1_1

http://www.amazon.com/When-Fat-Lady-Sings-History/dp/0920151345/ref=sr_1_6

http://www.amazon.com/Grabbing-Operas-Their-Tales-Liberating/dp/0920151388/ref=sr_1_16


I greatly admire a book by Hector Berlioz that contains a wealth of humor, entitled "Evenings with the Orchestra".

http://www.amazon.com/Evenings-Orchestra-Hector-Berlioz/dp/0226043746/ref=sr_1_1



That's all I've come across.

My favorite is A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera by Peter Conrad.

Excerpt:

>The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law. They are women like Isolde with her erotic medicine chest or Carmen with her intoxicating flower, men like the overworked phallic symbol Don Giovanni or Gounod's Faust who, rather than bothering with good works for mankind (to which the hero of Goethe's play commits himself), licks his lips and asks the devil to provide him with pleasures and young mistresses. Music buoys and bears along these clamorous creatures. What rises in and overflows from the orchestra pit is the geyser of their desires: they give voice to the promptings of the underground consciousness.

For books on individual composers:

Mozart's Operas by William Mann

Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols by Robert Donington

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre by Ellen Rosand is an important history about how opera transformed from an intellectual Florentine exercise into a more popular art form.

Thanks. I'm going tomorrow! If your interested in the story, the book on which it's based is really good to. And a film, The Limehouse Golem, also based on that book was just released last week.

Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500281947/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_0B5XCbS3Z81EM

This is the best side by side English/German libretto for the Ring I’ve encountered.

A Song of Love and Death sounds really interesting. Have you read Opera: Desire, Disease, Death - Hutcheon?
It's about disease in opera and the cultural significance of different diseases/pathologies. TB, cholera, syphillis etc.

Hogwood or Lang, both are sound, can't really go wrong with either. I liked that they weren't too music-ky if you know what I mean... that reminds me, I have read books about brahms, britten, and sibelius, but not yet Verdi. I should probably do that.

Side note about Eugene Onegin, the novel in verse: if you haven't read it yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. I recently started reading the Stanley Mitchell translation (Amazon.com) and can't put it down. I really enjoyed Onegin through Live in HD this season but reading the original form adds a new dimension to the opera. For example, the letter scene and subsequent rejection are even more intense in the written form than in the performance.

I used the Black Dog Library collection. Boheme, Figaro, and Carmen were the first three I read and listened to.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Dog-Opera-Library-Deluxe/dp/157912514X

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal.

Recommended reading for this thread:

• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
  
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff