On Opera - Softcover

Selected as an Outstanding AcademicTitle for 2007 by Choice Magazine "Most of the stuff one reads about opera is either hack or musicological maundering. With Bernard Williams you're in touch with a subtle, well-furnished mind which visualizes opera as a cultural artefact with complex literary and philosophical implications. And yet at the same time the text is lucid, intelligible and diverting, without a trace of post-modernist jargon or structuralist bullshit."-Jonathan Miller ". . . a new standpoint and an unfamiliar kind of thinking . . . the writing is a delight."-Stanley Sadie "The most powerful of Bernard [William's] intellectual dispositions was his humanism: a great delight in what people can be, at the beauty of what they can make in music, art and ideas, at the rich varieties of culture they can imagine and live, but also an empathetic sense of people's limitations and failures, their humanity in the sense of weakness as well as achievement."-Ronald Dworkin "Music was deeply important to Bernard [Williams]. He did not just like it. He studies it, practised it, and wrote about it."-Sir Keith Thomas "His sheer appetite for life was wide in scope and varied in mode. He brought clarity of mind and gaiety of spirit to crucial issues of identity, justice, society, psychology, art and (particularly) music."-Reverend John Drury

Bernard Williams was one of the most influential moral philosophers of his generation. A life-long opera-lover, his articles and essays, talks for the BBC, contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Opera, and programme-notes for The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera, generated a devoted following. This elegant volume brings together these widely scattered and largely unobtainable pieces, including two that have not been previously published. It covers an engaging range of topics from Mozart to Wagner, including sparkling essays on specific operas by those composers as well as Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Janacek and Tippett. Two aspects of music are of central importance to Williams: the demands of composing, performing and staging opera on the one hand, and the immediacy and power of its emotional purchase, the ability of music to move both the heart and the intellect, on the other. Reflecting Williams's brilliance, passion, and clarity of mind, these essays engage with, and illustrate, the enduring appeal of opera as an art form. Bernard Williams was Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University. He was a member of the board of the English National Opera in London, and author of many articles on music.