Skip to content
First and Lasting Impressions: Julius Rudel Looks Back on a Life in Music

BOYDELL & BREWER - CASEMATE - 2750419

First and Lasting Impressions: Julius Rudel Looks Back on a Life in Music

Sale price$45.00
SKU: 9781580464345
Quantity:
Pickup available at Juilliard Store Usually ready in 4 hours

First and Lasting Impressions: Julius Rudel Looks Back on a Life in Music

Juilliard Store

Pickup available, usually ready in 4 hours

144 West 66th Street
New York NY 10023
United States

+12127995000
The long-awaited memoir of Julius Rudel, the legendary opera conductor and arts administrator, gives insight into his ground-breaking repertory choices and his collaborations with Beverly Sills, Plácido Domingo, and others.
As a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy, Julius Rudel escaped from Austria after the Nazi invasion and moved to New York, where he began his career as an unpaid musical assistant and worked his way up through the ranks of the newly formed New York City Opera, being named in 1957 as the company's general director and principal conductor. Later, he became the first artistic director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
In his twenty-two-year leadership of New York City Opera, Rudel challenged audiences with new and unusual repertoire -- including fifteen world premieres and three seasons consisting entirely of American operas -- turning the popularly priced "People's Opera" into the most influential and daring opera company in the United States.

Rudel writes in detail of his unusual repertoire choices and of the political battles behind New York City Opera's move to Lincoln Center in 1966, and he reminisces about his legendary collaborations with Beverly Sills (on Handel's Giulio Cesare and Donizetti's "Three Queens") and Plácido Domingo (on Ginastera's Don Rodrigo) -- and about his work with other extraordinary talents including Norman Treigle, Phyllis Curtin, William Ball, Frank Corsaro, Tito Capobianco, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Prince, and Gian Carlo Menotti.

First and Lasting Impressions gives a rare personal look into Julius Rudel's career as a conductor and administrator during the glory years of New York City Opera.

Julius Rudel was general director and principal conductor of New York City Opera from 1957 to 1979, and since that time has been a frequent guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and many of the world's other great opera houses.