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As many as eight to ten million music lovers in the United States, Canada, and Europe have heard the moving words of Father Owen Lee during the first intermissions of the Saturday afternoon operas broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
His illuminating, intensely personal, immediately accessible half hours on the air have brought grateful letters by the thousand from both first-time listeners and veterans of fifty years of Met broadcast listening, from professors of music, art, literature, psychology, and science as well as from the general public.
Now First Intermissions makes available for the first time in print, twenty-one of Father Lee's finest radio talks, analyses of some of the best loved operas in the repertoire, including masterworks by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss. This is a book that brims full with opera lore, with the love of fine music, and with an abundance of good humor.
Above all, it relates opera to the human condition, to our capacity for good and evil, our sorrows and joys, our myths and beliefs, our personal triumphs and tragedies. Here are new ways of understanding the problem of evil in Verdi's Othello, the quest for self-realization in Wagner's Parsifal, the sense of Virgilian tears in Berlioz's Les Troyens, the irreversibility of time in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
- Each of these "first intermissions" explores a new idea with uncommon insight and clarity. Each relates opera to life. Aida, Lohengrin, Faust, and La Boheme are all, for Father Lee, dramas that sing of "the love and tears of great-hearted people who, we think humbly when the music is done, are not all that different from ourselves."
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Previews available in: English
Showing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
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1
First Intermissions: Commentaries from the Met Revised and Enlarged Edition
August 1, 2004, Limelight Editions
Paperback
in English
- Rev Exp edition
087910970X 9780879109707
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2
First intermissions: commentaries from the Met broadcasts
2002, Limelight Editions
in English
- 1st Limelight ed., Rev. and enl. ed
087910970X 9780879109707
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3
First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life From the Met
April 11, 1996, Oxford University Press, USA
in English
0195106490 9780195106497
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4
First intermissions: twenty-one great operas explored, explained, and brought to life from the Met
1995, Oxford University Press
in English
0195092554 9780195092554
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-231), discography and videography (p. 233-240), and index.
Based on the author's intermission commentaries from Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
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