Search results for ""Author Anne Ridler""

'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.

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Monteverdi’s 1607 version of the legend of Orpheus is arguably the first masterpiece of opera. Composed for the court of Mantua, where Monteverdi was employed, it is very different from his two other surviving operas, which he wrote more than thirty years later to entertain Venetian audiences in the first public opera houses. Orfeo was long considered untranslatable, because the text is so closely tied to the music, and the Venetian librettos owe some of their brilliance to Spanish Golden Age theatre. This opera guide is an opportunity to read all three of Monteverdi’s stage works together, in Anne Ridler’s graceful translations. Contents: Operas contained in this volume: Orfeo, Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, L’incoronazione di Poppea; Monteverdi, Opera and History, lain Fenlon; On Translating Opera, Anne Ridler; PART ONE: Mantua; A masterpiece for a Court, John Whenham; Music Examples; ‘Orfeo’: Favola in musica by Alessandro Striggio the Younger; Orfeo: English singing version by Anne Ridler; PART TWO: Venice; Musical Theatre in Venice, Paolo Fabbri; The Spanish Contribution to the Birth of Opera, Jack Sage; Monteverdi Returns to his Homeland, Tim Carter; Musical Examples; ll ritorno d’Ulisse in patria: Dramma in musica by Giacomo Badoaro; The Return of Ulysses: English singing version by Anne Ridler; Public Vice, Private Virtue, lain Fenlon and Peter Miller; Musical Examples; L’incoronazione di Poppea: Opera musicale by Giovanni Francesco Busenello; The Coronation of Poppea: English singing version by Anne Ridler

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