Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the Twenty-first Century

Usually despatched in 8 - 10 working days

Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the Twenty-first Century

About
Reviews
Explore

About

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s grand opera Moby-Dick was a stunning success in the world premiere production by the Dallas Opera in 2010. Robert K. Wallace attended the final performance of the Dallas production and has written this book so readers can experience the process by which this contemporary masterpiece was created and performed on stage. Interviews with the creative team and draft revisions of the libretto and score show the opera in the process of being born. Interviews with the principal singers and the production staff follow the five-week rehearsal period into the world premiere production, each step of the way illustrated by more than two hundred colour photographs by Karen Almond.

Opera fans, lovers of Moby-Dick, and students of American and global culture will welcome this book as a highly readable and visually enthralling account of the creation of a remarkable new opera that does full justice to its celebrated literary source. Just as Heggie and Scheer’s opera is enjoyed by operagoers with no direct knowledge of Moby-Dick, so will this book be enjoyed by opera fans unaware of Melville and by Melville fans unaware of opera.

Reviews

it is rare, indeed, that an opera production as brilliantly conceived as Scheer and Leonard Foglia's functions so seamlessly with score and libretto to form a unified whole. . . . [Wallace's] scene-by-scene and, at times, moment-by-moment analysis not only reveals the author's remarkable facility with the work but provides numerous specifics to listen for in Moby-Dick

Book

Contents

Download queue