About the Book
This annotated catalogue of approximately 1700 documents dealing with the staging of some 600 works - grand operas, lyric operas, comic operas and operettas - is of fundamental importance to all those interested in opera history, staging, and performance practice. It is the first catalogue to focus on archival documents dealing with the visual elements of operatic production and revealing not only how operas were originally staged in Paris but also, in many cases, how composers intended their works to be performed. Among the composers represented here are Adam, Aber, Beethoven, Bellini, Berlioz, Bizet, Boieldieu, Bruneau, Charpentier, Debussy, Delibes, Donizetti, Dukas, Flotow, Gevaert, Gluck, Gounod, Grisar, Hahn, Halevy, Herve, Honneger, Humperdinck, d'Indy. Lalo, Lecocq, Lehar, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Massé, Massenet, Messager, Meyerbeer, Moussorgsky; Mozart, Offenbach, Paer, Poise, Ponchielli, Puccini, Ravel, Reber, Reyer, Ricci, Romberg, Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Strauss (père and fils), Thomas, Verdi, Wagner, and Weber. Prepared by régisseurs or stage managers, livres scéniques offer a detailed account of entries, exits, gestures, movements and positions of principal characters and supernumeraries as well as descriptions of stage scenery, costumes and indications for lighting. An extensive introduction traces the history of both the staging manual in France, and of the Bibliothèque de l'Association de la regie théâtrale, the remarkable library that preserves this monumental collection of largely unexplored documents.
