Product Description: This collection of essays marks the tercentenary in 1995 of Purcell's death. The essays represent the best recent research and deal mainly with the autograph manuscripts, Purcell's compositional technique, the relationship between Purcell and his teacher John Blow, a reassessment of Purcell court odes, performance practice and wordsetting, and eighteenth-century reception history, particularly regarding King Arthur...read more

Product Description: This interdisciplinary study attempts to make sense of what has long been regarded as a chaotic period in the history of opera in London. In 1778, R.B. Sheridan acquired the King's Theatre and its resident opera company in what we would now call a leveraged buy-out, plunging the opera into escalating debts that were to haunt it into the 1840s...read more

Product Description: The extraordinary correspondence between the impresario Felice Giardini and his friend Gabriele Leone lies at the centre of this study of Italian opera in London in the eighteenth century. Hired by Giardini in 1763 to engage Italian performers for a season of opera and ballet at The King's Theatre, Leone was sued by the impresario when the performers he had recruited proved to be second rate...read more