Overview

Full Product Details

9780997730401

Table of Contents

Reviews

Ever since its successful premiere in Vienna in 1786 and its rapturous reception in Prague a year later, Mozart's Figaro has enchanted, bemused, provoked, and challenged singers, conductors, directors, and translators. Many have regarded it as a priceless work deserving of respect, even reverence. Other contemporaries, while sharing this admiration for the work, have struggled to find ways, imaginative as well as bizarre, to bring it to life in current terms. It is the great achievement of Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis to have found a way to combine these two points of view. They are more than simply aware of Figaro's historical background; they have immersed it in Beaumarchais's La Folle journee, amalgamating opera and play by offering optional dialogue translated from the play to replace recitatives and set pieces. They have produced a bilingual vocal score, with a new translation that brilliantly presents the text in rhyming terms, while remaining faithful to the original. What we now have is a Figaro for our time-Figaro as a flexible masterpiece. John Dizikes, December 30, 2016, author of Opera in America, A Cultural History (National Book Critics Circle Criticism Award,1993)..... [It is] almost incredible that we were able to do this with seventeen and eighteen year old singers. Thank you so much for the use of your edition, which is definitely what made this possible within the constraints of a school setting. The singers all enjoyed themselves beyond measure, and it is clearly something that they will take away with them, and remember forever. They are obviously young, and of differing levels of accomplishment, but all were able to experience Figaro through the Flexible Figaro. Kathryn Turpin, Voice Teacher and Opera Director, Shrewsbury School, England, 2015..... Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable librettos I've been involved with. It's wonderful when a work can be great opera and great theater at the same time, and this libretto pulls it off. The lyrics are literate and yet singable and easy for the ear to catch, the jokes are genuinely funny, and the Beaumarchais dialogue adds tremendous bite and color to the opera. Our cast enjoyed working on it, and our audiences were delighted to be able to laugh at every witty line and follow every twist of the plot. Even our critics approved of it-not an easy trick for an opera in English. David Scott Marley, Dramaturge, Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera), 2001..... [T]he production was so fun, fresh, and alive that the evening proved a triumph. [Dudley and Ellis's] edition deserves to be produced by major companies. Jason Serinus, Opera News, July, 2001

[It is] almost incredible that we were able to do this with seventeen and eighteen year old singers. Thank you so much for the use of your edition, which is definitely what made this possible within the constraints of a school setting. The singers all enjoyed themselves beyond measure, and it is clearly something that they will take away with them, and remember forever. They are obviously young, and of differing levels of accomplishment, but all were able to experience Figaro through the Flexible Figaro. Kathryn Turpin Voice Teacher and Opera Director, Shrewsbury School, England, 2015 Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable librettos I've been involved with. It's wonderful when a work can be great opera and great theater at the same time, and this libretto pulls it off. The lyrics are literate and yet singable and easy for the ear to catch, the jokes are genuinely funny, and the Beaumarchais dialogue adds tremendous bite and color to the opera. Our cast enjoyed working on it, and our audiences were delighted to be able to laugh at every witty line and follow every twist of the plot. Even our critics approved of it -- not an easy trick for an opera in English. David Scott Marley Dramaturge, Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera), 2001 .. .[T]he production was so fun, fresh, and alive that the evening proved a triumph. [Dudley and Ellis's] edition deserves to be produced by major companies. Jason Serinus Opera News, July, 2001 Ever since its successful premiere in Vienna in 1786 and its rapturous reception in Prague a year later, Mozart's Figaro has enchanted, bemused, provoked, and challenged singers, conductors, directors, and translators. Many have regarded it as a priceless work deserving of respect, even reverence. Other contemporaries, while sharing this admiration for the work, have struggled to find ways, imaginative as well as bizarre, to bring it to life in current terms. It is the great achievement of Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis to have found a way to combine these two points of view. They are more than simply aware of Figaro's historical background; they have immersed it in Beaumarchais's La Folle journee, amalgamating opera and play by offering optional dialogue translated from the play to replace recitatives and set pieces. They have produced a bilingual vocal score, with a new translation that brilliantly presents the text in rhyming terms, while remaining faithful to the original. What we now have is a Figaro for our time-Figaro as a flexible masterpiece. John Dizikes, December 30, 2016, author of Opera in America, A Cultural History (National Book Critics Circle Criticism Award,1993) [It is] almost incredible that we were able to do this with seventeen and eighteen year old singers. Thank you so much for the use of your edition, which is definitely what made this possible within the constraints of a school setting. The singers all enjoyed themselves beyond measure, and it is clearly something that they will take away with them, and remember forever. They are obviously young, and of differing levels of accomplishment, but all were able to experience Figaro through the Flexible Figaro. Kathryn Turpin Voice Teacher and Opera Director, Shrewsbury School, England, 2015 Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable librettos I've been involved with. It's wonderful when a work can be great opera and great theater at the same time, and this libretto pulls it off. The lyrics are literate and yet singable and easy for the ear to catch, the jokes are genuinely funny, and the Beaumarchais dialogue adds tremendous bite and color to the opera. Our cast enjoyed working on it, and our audiences were delighted to be able to laugh at every witty line and follow every twist of the plot. Even our critics approved of it -- not an easy trick for an opera in English. David Scott Marley Dramaturge, Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera), 2001 ...[T]he production was so fun, fresh, and alive that the evening proved a triumph. [Dudley and Ellis's] edition deserves to be produced by major companies. Jason Serinus Opera News, July, 2001 Ever since its successful premiere in Vienna in 1786 and its rapturous reception in Prague a year later, Mozart's Figaro has enchanted, bemused, provoked, and challenged singers, conductors, directors, and translators. Many have regarded it as a priceless work deserving of respect, even reverence. Other contemporaries, while sharing this admiration for the work, have struggled to find ways, imaginative as well as bizarre, to bring it to life in current terms. It is the great achievement of Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis to have found a way to combine these two points of view. They are more than simply aware of Figaro's historical background; they have immersed it in Beaumarchais's La Folle journee, amalgamating opera and play by offering optional dialogue translated from the play to replace recitatives and set pieces. They have produced a bilingual vocal score, with a new translation that brilliantly presents the text in rhyming terms, while remaining faithful to the original. What we now have is a Figaro for our time-Figaro as a flexible masterpiece. John Dizikes, December 30, 2016, author of Opera in America, A Cultural History (National Book Critics Circle Criticism Award,1993)..... [It is] almost incredible that we were able to do this with seventeen and eighteen year old singers. Thank you so much for the use of your edition, which is definitely what made this possible within the constraints of a school setting. The singers all enjoyed themselves beyond measure, and it is clearly something that they will take away with them, and remember forever. They are obviously young, and of differing levels of accomplishment, but all were able to experience Figaro through the Flexible Figaro. Kathryn Turpin, Voice Teacher and Opera Director, Shrewsbury School, England, 2015..... Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable librettos I've been involved with. It's wonderful when a work can be great opera and great theater at the same time, and this libretto pulls it off. The lyrics are literate and yet singable and easy for the ear to catch, the jokes are genuinely funny, and the Beaumarchais dialogue adds tremendous bite and color to the opera. Our cast enjoyed working on it, and our audiences were delighted to be able to laugh at every witty line and follow every twist of the plot. Even our critics approved of it-not an easy trick for an opera in English. David Scott Marley, Dramaturge, Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera), 2001..... [T]he production was so fun, fresh, and alive that the evening proved a triumph. [Dudley and Ellis's] edition deserves to be produced by major companies. Jason Serinus, Opera News, July, 2001

[It is] almost incredible that we were able to do this with seventeen and eighteen year old singers. Thank you so much for the use of your edition, which is definitely what made this possible within the constraints of a school setting. The singers all enjoyed themselves beyond measure, and it is clearly something that they will take away with them, and remember forever. They are obviously young, and of differing levels of accomplishment, but all were able to experience Figaro through the Flexible Figaro. Kathryn Turpin Voice Teacher and Opera Director, Shrewsbury School, England, 2015 Sherwood Dudley and Miriam Ellis's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable librettos I've been involved with. It's wonderful when a work can be great opera and great theater at the same time, and this libretto pulls it off. The lyrics are literate and yet singable and easy for the ear to catch, the jokes are genuinely funny, and the Beaumarchais dialogue adds tremendous bite and color to the opera. Our cast enjoyed working on it, and our audiences were delighted to be able to laugh at every witty line and follow every twist of the plot. Even our critics approved of it -- not an easy trick for an opera in English. David Scott Marley Dramaturge, Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera), 2001 .. .[T]he production was so fun, fresh, and alive that the evening proved a triumph. [Dudley and Ellis's] edition deserves to be produced by major companies. Jason Serinus Opera News, July, 2001

Author Information

Mozart wrote Le nozze di Figaro to a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte in 1786, based on a play by Caron de Beaumarchais. For further information about this great composer's life, consult an online biography. Walter Sherwood Dudley received the B.M. degree in music and the B.A. in French at the University of North Texas. After a year of studying French literature in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, he began graduate study in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, and earned the Ph.D. in 1968. He was appointed assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz in 1968, where he remained until 2002, retiring as a full professor. Dudley was a major factor in instituting the B.A. degree in music at UCSC in 1969 and a vigorous advocate for the establishment of the B.M. degree in performance in the 1980s. Throughout his career Dudley has specialized in the history of orchestration and in creating modern editions of historical works to reflect both the contemporaneous performance practice and modern concepts of the works. Sherwood Dudley's interest in opera performed in France during the late eighteenth century has led him to focus his recent work on editing and conducting operas, notably Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Francois Devienne's Les Visitandines (Sisters of the Visitation). In collaboration with colleague Miriam Ellis, Dudley has created an English version of the Mozart opera, following the lead of its first Parisian production in 1793, which replaced Mozart's recitatives with portions of spoken dialogue from Beaumarchais's play. This edition is now being produced throughout the U.S. The performance edition of Les Visitandines contains the music for the expanded three-act version of the opera, which Dudley discovered in Lille, France, in 1985. He conducted the premiere of this edition at UC Santa Cruz in May, 1997. Dudley is the former editor of the scholarly articles for The Opera Journal. Miriam Ellis, Ph.D, is Lecturer Emerita (currently called back to service), at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught French language and theater for over 30 years, was stage director for the UCSC Opera Workshop, and founded the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP). Now in its 17th season, MEIP is the only multilingual program in academia which produces annual fully-staged theater performances in several languages (with English super-titles) on the same bill. Dr. Ellis has translated seven complete opera librettos for performance, most of which have been performed in English, as well as many arias for the texts of concert and recital programs that she produced for the Young Artists Series of the Santa Cruz Opera Society, Inc. (SCOSI). Together with Dr. Sherwood Dudley, she founded this group in 1976, and it has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Dr. Ellis frequently contributes her opera translations to on-line sites, such as the Aria Database, and is on the editorial board of ResMusica, a daily online international journal devoted to classical music and dance, for which she has translated concert and opera reviews, interviews, and various other texts. Over the course of her career at UCSC, Dr. Ellis served as guide and interpreter for Eugene Ionesco, famed French playright of the Absurd, during his month-long campus residency in May, 1979. She also served as translator and interpreter for Mme Danielle Mitterand, wife of then French President Francois Mitterand, who visited campus in 1989 and presented a public lecture for a large audience. In 2000, Dr. Ellis was awarded the medal and title of Chevalier des Palmes Academiques by the French government. Since 2002, Dr. Ellis has taught courses devoted to musical theater, opera history, Romanticism, and other literary and artistic movements, for the Lifelong Learners affiliated with UCSC (now the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCSC).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available