Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments: Trash Music [Paperback]

This book approaches opera fantasias  instrumental works that use themes from a single opera as the body of their virtuosic and flamboyant material  both historically and theoretically, concentrating on compositions for and by woodwind-instrument performers in Italy in the nineteenth century.

Introduction

Chapter 1: The opera fantasia in musicological context?

Chapter 2: The Italian context?

Chapter 3: Genre theory and the opera fantasia?

Chapter 4: Gender implications of the opera fantasia?

Chapter 5: A return to musical narrative through the opera fantasia?

Chapter 6: Opera fantasias on Verdis Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera?

Conclusion?

Rachel N. Becker is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Oboe at Boise State University, USA. She previously taught at the University of Cambridge, UK. Rachels research focuses on issues of genre, virtuosity, and gender. She has published on musical ecphrasis and on gendering of woodwind instruments, and she remains active internationally as an oboist.

This book approaches opera fantasias  instrumental works that use themes from a single opera as the body of their virtuosic and flamboyant material  both historically and theoretically, concentrating on compositions for and by woodwind-instrument performers in Italy in the nineteenth century.

Important overlapping strands include the concept of virtuosity and its gradual demonization, the strong gendered overtones of individual woodwind instruments and of virtuosity, the distinct Italian context of these fantasias, the presentation and alteration of opera narratives in opera fantasias, and the technicallÃ*