Business of Opera

Anastasia Belina-Johnson is Deputy Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, London, the author of Die tägliche Mühe ein Mensch zu sein (2013) and A Musician Divided: André Tchaikowsky in his own Words (2013), and co-editor of Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (2013). She is currently researching the performance and reception of Silver Age operetta in Poland between 1906 and 1939.Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds, UK. His books include: From the Erotic to the Demonic (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). Among his edited books is The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009).

• Contents: Introduction, Anastasia Belina-Johnson and Derek B. Scott; Trends and innovations in opera, Nicholas Payne; Baroque opera, historical information, and business; or, how a nerd became a hipster, Christine Fischer; From state opera to multilevel opera business: the transformation of opera governance in Berlin, London and Paris at the end of the 20th century, Sarah Zalfen; The business of composing opera: a composer’s perspective, Paul Alan Barker; Interdisciplinary support for opera practice in the UK, Christopher Newell; The world opera: a new global format for the business of opera, Jason E. Geistweidt and Niels W. Lund; Opera orchestral contracts considered as a research resource, George Kennaway; Behind the curtain: shaping a new Siegfried, Cordelia Chenault; A Ring for people and place: creating expectation and fulfilling demand, Jennifer Daniel; Strategic nationalism towards the imagined community: the rise and success story of Finnish opera, Liisamaija Hautsalo; Bibliography; Index.

This book helps sharpen the focus of music historians, spectators-consumers of music, and the multiple actors involved in the business of opera. By taking us behind the scenes, it reminds us that opera certainly lives on the talent of its creators and performers, but survives, also, on money from those who finance it. It is one of the merits of the book to provide concrete and emblematic evidence.Mélanie Traversier, Transposition: Musique et Sciences Sociales