Opera: A History in Documents by Piero Weiss Opera: A History in Documents by Piero Weiss PDF, ePub eBook D0wnl0ad In Opera: A History in Documents , Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo , to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail , and to Bertolt Brecht's wr