Opera in Video

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Opera in Video will contain 250 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries, and then delivered online through streaming video. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon. The result is a dynamic and powerful resource for performers, researchers, and students.

Opera in Video is one of the first releases in Alexander Street’s series of Critical Video Editions™, which makes video more useful and functional for scholarship than ever before. You can browse, search, and cite the videos to the exact moment. New tools let you make custom clips of the operas and assemble them into class-specific playlists. For the first time, students, instructors, and researchers can bookmark specific arias, acts, staging examples—even a single recitative passage—with permanent, per-second URLs, and then annotate them, share them, email them, include them in papers and course reserves, use them with course management applications, and see playlists created by other users around the world.

The collection presents an overview of the most commonly studied operas in music history, opera literature, and performance classes. Multiple performances and stagings worldwide of the major operas allow for analysis of stage design, vocal techniques, roles, and musical interpretation across time periods, opera houses, and conductors.

Together with Alexander Street’s online music listening and reference databases, Classical Scores Library and Classical Music Reference Library, students and researchers now have a single place to find the entire performance of an opera; the full online score with rekeyed, searchable text; the performance history; and the production background.

CONTENT

Opera in Video offers more than 500 hours of streaming video, available electronically for the first time. Classic performances from the top opera companies and documentaries on specific operas, composers, and companies cover the full range of operatic composition, from the Baroque to the twentieth century—a welcome permanent addition to your library collection.

Performances targeted for Opera in Video include Carmen, with Maria Ewing conducted by Zubin Mehta (1991); Billy Budd, with Thomas Allen and Richard Langridge conducted by David Atherton (1988); Julius Caesar, with Janet Baker, Sarah Walker, and Valerie Masterson conducted by Charles Mackerras (1984); L’Africaine, with Placido Domingo, Shirley Verrett, and Ruth Ann Swenson conducted by Maurizio Arena (1988); La Bohème, with Mirella Freni, Luciano Pavarotti, and Nicolai Ghiaurov conducted by Tiziano Severini (1988); Capriccio, with Kiri Te Kanawa, Simon Keenlyside, and Victor Braun conducted by Donald Runnicles (1993); Orlando Furioso, with Marilyn Horne, Susan Patterson, and Sandra Walker conducted by Randall Behr (1989); Aida, with Maria Chiara, Luciano Pavarotti, and Nicolai Ghiaurov conducted by Lorin Maazel (1985); The Rake’s Progress, with Kiri Te Kanawa, Felicity Lott, Frederica von Stade, Ileana Cotrubas, and Thomas Allen conducted by Sylvain Cambreling (1996); and hundreds more.

HOW WILL YOU USE IT?

Opera in Video brings a new dimension to nearly all aspects of performance studies and production history:

     •  Multiple productions of select operas will allow for comparative analysis, showing various 
        interpretations of staging and set design;

     •  Videos of legendary performers are together for the first time, cross searchable and
        available for side-by-side comparison;

     •  Interviews with singers, stage designers, and directors, integrated with excerpts of live
        performances, show the development of each production. For example, users can see 
        Marilyn Horne discuss the intricacies of singing Baroque opera and then listen to her
        perform three arias from Rodelinda to demonstrate her points;

    •  Documentary histories cover such varied subjects as a peek behind the scenes at the
       Opera Company of Boston; Dorothy Kirsten’s life and work; the history of Aida; an
       introduction to Aulis Sallinen’s opera The Palace; and other topics.

Specially developed controlled vocabularies let users browse by composer, genre, performer, librettist, and time period. The search can be simple or complex, using one search field or combining all. Queries such as Show all Baroque operas written in 1724 or Find all examples of cavatinas sung by a soprano are easy to answer from a single search screen. Once you identify a video, a click delivers the entire work for viewing over the Internet. Move back and forth within the video, replay favorite segments, bookmark and annotate playlists, and include the selections in papers or for online course reserves.

Opera in Video expands your library’s existing collection of video recordings, while minimizing the problem of damaged or lost VHS or DVD copies and saving shelf space. Both beginner and advanced users will use the service for teaching, learning, and research.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Opera in Video is available on the Web, either through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or annual subscription. The collection will contain more than 500 hours of streaming video productions, including more than 250 performances and documentaries. The service works on PCs or Macs and requires no setup—all you need is an Internet browser.

The collection is part of Alexander Street’s growing series of online databases in music and the performing arts, including Music Online: Listening; Music Online: Reference; Theatre in Video; and Dance in Video. It’s also part of the Critical Video Editions series, presenting scholarly versions of streaming videos in music and the performing arts, history, psychological counseling, and other disciplines.