The Silence is the story of William Rose, a man who, while searching the world for his missing wife and daughter, is kidnapped and held in a secret Iranian prison. After many years of torture, abuse and a slow descent into insanity, secrets about his family manifest as mysterious and magical occurrences, creating a dangerous tension between the prisoners and guards. Questions begin to arise: Who is actually in charge of this prison? Why haven’t the guards ever met the warden? Why is the prison haunted by mysterious voices? And what exactly would it take to crumble the walls of this corrupt institution? Act II scene iii, The Hour of Angels – William sits alone in his cell, carving the images of his wife and daughter into the wall. As he begs his family to come back to him, the image of his wife slowly comes to life. Intermezzo and Act II scene i, Danger in the Meadow – Flashback. The prison guards spy on Christina and Madelyn Rose as they play in a meadow not far from the secret prison. Christina sees them hiding and in a panic sends her daughter to a distant building to hide and look for help.

Marilyn Home, American mezzo-soprano, debuted on the operatic stage in 1954 and retired from the operatic stage in 1996 and the classical stage in 1999. She sang nearly sixty opera roles, mostly bel canto, from the soprano, mezzosoprano, and contralto repertoire. She performed more than 1400 recitals during her classical career, and at the time of this writing (spring 2000), continued to sing pops concerts and recitals. Her importance in the American opera world as well as her diversity and longevity cause her to be a model worthy of study.Chapter one contains an introduction to Home's accomplishments and awards, and the procedures followed in the study. Chapter two outlines Home's early life and how it led to her successful career. Chapter three provides a comparison of Home's career to the careers of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Rose Bampton, Janet Baker, and Giullietta Simionato. Chapter four is a discussion of Home's vocal technique and musicianship, while chapter five provides information on selected operatic roles and her importance in the Rossini revival. Chapter six presents Home's recital career, with special consideration of her performances on the William Jewell College Fine Arts Program and the formation of the Marilyn Home Foundation. Appendix A is an interview transcript that includes Home's thoughts about a number of her opera roles, recital planning, and various mentors and musical collaborators (such as Joan Sutherland and Henry Lewis). Other appendices include a list of Home's operatic roles, recital programs, and a selected discography and videography.Marilyn Home had a remarkable career, and her great longevity is a result of her technical virtuosity, intelligent choices, careful planning, and audience rapport. Home was an important figure in the American opera world. She was an avid student of her instrument and a zealous guard of her vocal resources. Future generations of singers need to consider the lessons that can be learned by examining Home's career. Home was a singer for all generations. She adds positive light to the title "diva," and she is a model worthy of accolades and study. / School of Music

<p>Bilaga: 2 CD/DVD</p>

Från notbild till kropp och intuition. Det uttrycket är essensen av detta examensarbete. Jag kommer att beskriva mitt instuderings- och fördjupningsarbete med rollkaraktären Cleopatra ur Händels opera Julius Caesar och tre av hennes arior. När man interpreterar operaarior har man mycket att förhålla sig till, den egna personliga tolkningen utvecklas och formas i flera steg. Denna kreativa process kommer jag att undersöka och dokumentera i denna text. Framförallt kommer jag att försöka få en djupare insikt i vem Cleopatra var som historisk person. Jag kan redan på förhand säga att hennes och mina livserfarenheter ter sig väldigt annorlunda. Just därför vill jag sätta mig in i och reflektera över hennes livsöde. Jag tror att det kommer att berika min gestaltning av henne i de tre ariorna ur operan. En annan infallsvinkel som jag kommer att vidröra är barocksång och formen för en barockaria. / <p>Bilaga: 1 CD</p>

<p>Bilaga: 1 CD</p>

Italian opera gained an odd resonance in eighteenth-century British sensibility. By turns loved and hated, it acted on the British imagination as a catalyst both for some of the age's most brilliant satire, and for some of the century's most unusual musical extravagances. This dissertation argues that, despite (or in some ways because of) the eventual failure of Italian serious opera and its English hybrid forms to attain status within the musical canon, the progress of opera played a vital role in shaping and reflecting the formation of British national identity, and that, reciprocally, attempts to find a national identity played a large part in opera's fate in Britain. For the competing forces and factions of Italian and English opera in 1730s London, the bid for supremacy was inevitably linked with an appeal to authority (whether that of royalty, the nobility, the populace, or ideologies of the nation) that involved stressing their link with the national interest. The first chapter examines the relationship between the consistently politicised language used to discuss opera and the mode of civic action and public spiritedness still requisite amongst the Nobility, charting ways in which aristocratic support of this foreign genre might be reconciled to British concerns. The second chapter looks to a particularly problematic instance of opera's apparent politicisation in the 1730s Lord Hervey's analysis of the division between Handel and the 'Opera of the Nobility' to propose a possible 'solution' through the two Ariannas of 1734. In so doing, it shows opera's role within a culture of emulation, emphasising the flexibility and social contingency of operatic interpretation. Coterminous with Italian opera, but of a lower status, were ballad and burlesque opera, their critique of national cultural identity all the sharper for their role as cultural and formal boundary markers. Chapter three demonstrates though exploration of the curious and much-criticised English 'opera', Hurlothrumbo (1729), that British dislike of opera was bound up with the deep-seated fear of luxury. While 'Hurlothrumbo' was used as a derogatory epithet until the end of the century, this operatic work also provides a fascinating example of how opera producers might try to negotiate British unease. Chapter four examines the concerted attempt in the 1730s to associate English opera and musical theatre with topics of national interest through composers' and playwrights' appropriation of the stories of historical British ballads as the local equivalents of the venerable texts of Italian opera. The fact that many of the works discussed are 'problem pieces', considered generically, authorially or hermeneutically unstable, points not only to the reason for indigenous opera's failure to achieve canonical status, but also to a more fundamental problem with the role of opera (and, indeed, music in general) in the still-forming British identity. In the final chapter I turn from the problems of opera to the undoubted success of Handel, who himself made the transition from opera to oratorio; I evaluate the composer's apotheosis as a national hero through examining manifestations of his image in the 1730s and at the time of his death.

While considerable research has explored the skills elite professionals use to sustain performance excellence in a multitude of disciplines, much less research has focused on professional musicians. Multi-faceted skills are needed to maintain performance excellence. This research investigates the deliberate skills and processes professional opera singers employ to preserve elite performance. Data drawn from individual semi-structured interviews with ten professional opera singers, with a minimum career length of ten to twenty years, were analyzed within the methodology of grounded theory. Results revealed a strong role for creation of a music "road-map" in the context of deliberate preparedness in both physical and mental skills, which contributed to high levels of learning self-efficacy. High-level skills cultivated in the preparation phase were applied directly within the context of live performance, facilitated "flow" experiences, involved energy exchanges with other performers and audiences, and resulted in higher levels of performing self-efficacy.

While considerable research has explored the skills elite professionals use to sustain performance excellence in a multitude of disciplines, much less research has focused on professional musicians. Multi-faceted skills are needed to maintain performance excellence. This research investigates the deliberate skills and processes professional opera singers employ to preserve elite performance. Data drawn from individual semi-structured interviews with ten professional opera singers, with a minimum career length of ten to twenty years, were analyzed within the methodology of grounded theory. Results revealed a strong role for creation of a music "road-map" in the context of deliberate preparedness in both physical and mental skills, which contributed to high levels of learning self-efficacy. High-level skills cultivated in the preparation phase were applied directly within the context of live performance, facilitated "flow" experiences, involved energy exchanges with other performers and audiences, and resulted in higher levels of performing self-efficacy.

The concept of style fusion for visual storytelling is introduced and applied in this research. Style fusion is the process of identifying two distinct styles as sources, which are from different artists or culture backgrounds, and applying features and visual symbols from both to develop a new style. As a proof of concept, the source performance styles selected for fusion are traditional Chinese Beijing opera and hip hop. A set of guidelines for this style fusion are developed after an analysis of the visual symbols of each source style. A character and an environment design fusion are done based on these guidelines. Finally, the style fusion is visualized using 3D models.

Regina is a one-act opera based on the true story of Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in the Jewish faith, in 1935. Jonas struggled to gain this recognition and subsequently perished in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was only in 1991 that another woman uncovered the papers that proved Jonas' legacy. This opera follows Regina, waiting to be uncovered in the piles of paper records locked away in East Berlin, and through vignettes of her past. This is paralleled with the story of Anna, who is desperately fighting against her Nazi father's legacy. Anna believes that, if she can uncover stories like Regina's, she will free herself of her father's torment. Regina is similarly haunted by her mother's ghost, whose discouraging words have shaped Regina's lifelong self-doubt. Both Regina and Anna need to be set free. This opera uses leitmotifs to differentiate the two main characters, but these themes are also often used as signifiers of the common struggles that both characters embody and represent. As well, they employ rhythmic and melodic styles that pervade both the vocal and instrumental parts throughout the opera, thus unifying the characters' goals. Because of the fact that the opera takes place in multiple time periods (sometimes simultaneously) the various choices of instrumentation and harmonic material often reflect these temporal shifts (for example, the accordion is often associated with Regina's path to ordination, her relationship with her rabbi, and a time of joy and calm before the war.) In addition, melodic and rhythmic motifs are used to represent specific as well as general events, such as the three-note 'ordination' theme and the two-chord repeated motif in the piano. The overall extended tonal style contributes to a largely lyrical setting of Maya Rabinovitch's libretto.