Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. His latest book is a collection of some of the more provocative essays he has published over many decades that examine how we use and abuse ‘history’.If the past is everything that has ever happened, he asks, why does what we call ‘history’ keep changing? What (or who) causes historical change? Could aspects of the past itself have been different? What do we choose to retain as our ‘heritage’ and why? Are ‘the arts’ part of history ...

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was the Shakespeare of opera, the composer of Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aida and Otello. The Chorus of Hebrew slaves from Nabucco (1842) is regarded in Italy as virtually an alternative national anthem – and the great tragedian rounded off his career fifty years later with a rousing comedy, Falstaff.When Verdi was born, much of northern Italy was under Napoleonic rule, and Verdi grew up dre...

The Gilded Stage is a comprehensive tour of the world of opera. From its origins in the courts of northern Italy, to its internationally recognised position in modern culture, Snowman explores the social history of opera houses and impresarios, composers and patrons, artists and audiences.Even the most flamboyant composers could scarcely have imagined the global reach of opera in our own times. More opera is performed, financed, seen, heard, filmed and broadcast than ever ...

With a wealth of famous tunes and meticulous characterisation, Don Giovanni is an undisputed masterpiece created by Mozart out of a thread-bare fairground gig. The Don – for whom both sexes have a sneaking admiration – gatecrashes proceedings, serenading and seducing as he goes. As wily as he is insatiable, he outclasses all who are out to get him, including a jealous bumpkin and the down-at-heel Elvira. But a stone statue seals his doom and drags him down into hellfire. From the Champagne...

Although the story of Figaro's success in preventing the Count of Almaviva's seduction of his fiancée Susanna was politically explosive, it was tolerated in the court of the relatively enlightened Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. Mozart's opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, uses a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, and was premièred in Vienna in 1786. It was based on a famous play by the Frenchman Beaumarchais, a sequel to The Barber of Seville. Characters including Figaro, the Countess, Cherubino the page, ...

Puccini's obsession with detail ensured the success of La Bohème, his opera about the impoverished 'artistes' in Paris in the 1830s. Soon after its première, people started calling their baby daughters Mimi. The story of this seamstress, her hectic but fraught love affair with the poet Rodolfo and her tragic death from consumption (tuberculosis), never fail to touch the audience. Che gelida manina, Mi chiamano Mimì …, and O soave fanciulla have become some of the most popular operatic exce...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLYFor more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of bal...

*** Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3 ***In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation - harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording, broadcasting - strikes us with its original force. He focuses on what changed whe...

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. T...

Born in Venice, Italy, Antonio Vivaldi was one of the most influential and highly regarded Baroque composers, although his fame blazed only briefly. He is most remembered for his concertos, particularly “The Four Seasons,” but his overall production was enormous, ranging from orchestral and vocal music for both secular and church settings, as well as opera scores and libretti. In addition, Vivaldi was a master violinist and spent much of his career as an instructor at a famous institution ...

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of the Sicilian Lampedusa family, died impoverished and unknown, leaving behind the manuscript of a book he had recently finished. The following year the book, The Leopard, was published in Italy and has since been widely translated and recognized as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. For over a quarter of a century, the reclusive man's papers were hidden from the public, until David Gilmour was befriended by Lampedusa's adopted son....

The dramatic story of five key turning points in a thousand years of Western music - discoveries that changed the course of history.Who first invented 'Doh Re Mi...'?What do we mean by "in tune"?Looking back down the corridor of a thousand years, Howard Goodall guides us through the stories of five seismic developments in the history of Western music. His "big bangs" may not be the ones we expect - some are surprising and some are so obvious we overlook them - but a...