Books by "Margaret B. Bailey"
2 books found
The winning contestants on University Challenge could not identify lines from one of the best-known English poems, Keats Ode to Autumn, and seemed unconcerned about their ignorance. This book provides an engaging retrospect for readers who have forgotten, or who have never had much chance to study, their own literature and history. In presenting a kind of cross-section of this abundant inheritance, it supplies ample selective quotes, and suggests an antidote to the strange sickness of modernity, which seems to have forgotten that memory is the mother of the muses. Literature, one of the bulwarks of defence against unwarranted authority, has been attacked, distorted, and eliminated from curricula because its traditional teachings, handed on for generations, oppose a determined modernist agenda. The age demands conformity ; the poets are independent. The traditional writings banished from shelves and the popular imagination educate the soul, inculcating such qualities as fortitude, one of the forgotten virtues. Criticism of and from the media, the self-appointed commentators who make up the narratives of the day, has been undertaken by analysts as diverse as Noam Chomsky and William Buckley. Some of their works are listed in the bibliography. Myths and heroic tales that inform western literature and adjust our perspective come principally from the Greeks, especially from Homer, and from Vergil, who told the great tale of Troy that fulfilled the dreams of Rome. Homer delighted in the natural world, in beautifully made arms, cups, tapestries, all bathed in a pitiless light. The old Anglo Saxon poets who also wrote in the epic tradition felt particularly the mightiness of evil, the transience of life, and the power of the word to shape the world, and to hold themselves in remembrance. The Middle Ages achieved the greatest dream of all, uniting the mythical with the practical, painting great panoramas of life, meditating upon the unseen, and the Elizabethan age rediscovered heroism and the power of personality. After the free discourse and argument of the seventeenth century, with its resulting wars and fragmentation, a more cohesive nation emerged, one that came to believe in reason and mans own mind ; while the Romantic poets who followed show, sometimes disastrously, the wildness of individualism, of diversity apart from social integration and a common faith. The long Victorian afternoon and golden evening of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of these tendencies and a renewing of faith, but there has been no significant new development from the revolution and romanticism of a century earlier. Rather the movement has played itself out with post modernism.
In this revised and expanded edition of Operas in English: A Dictionary, Margaret Ross Griffel updates her work on operas written specifically to an English text, including not only works originally in English but also those set to new English librettos. Since the book’s initial publication in 1999, Griffel has added nearly 900 new items, bringing the total number of entries in this new edition to 4,400, covering the world of opera in English from 1634 through 2011. The front matter includes a brief history of English opera, to “set the stage” for the dictionary entries that follow. Listed alphabetically, each opera entry includes alternative titles; a full, descriptive title; the number of acts; composer’s name; librettist’s name, with original language of the libretto; the source of the text (date, place, and cast of the first performance); date of composition (if it occurred substantially earlier than the premiere); similar information for the first U.S. (including colonial) and British (England, Scotland, Wales) performances; brief plot summary; main characters (names and vocal ranges, where known); names of noteworthy numbers; comments on special musical problems and techniques; other settings of the text, including non-English ones; other operas, if any, involving the same story or characters (cross references are indicated by asterisks). Entries include such information as first and critical editions of the score and libretto; a bibliography, ranging from scholarly studies to more informal journal articles and reviews; a discography; and information on video recordings. Operas in English features four appendixes, a selective bibliography, and two indexes. The first appendix lists composers, their places and years of birth and death, and their operas included in the text as entries; the second does the same for librettists; the third records authors whose works inspired or were adapted for the librettos; and the fourth comprises a chronological listing of the A–Z entries, including the date of first performance, the city of the premiere (or composition date if unperformed or performed much later), the short title of the opera, and the composer. There is a main character index and an index of singers, conductors, producers, composers of other settings, and other key figures.