 |
|
 |
Falling Up
The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, The Authorized Biography
Thomas Holliday
Foreword by Plácido Domingo
Cloth $45.00
| 978-0-8156-1003-8
| 2012
"Tom Holliday’s biography of Carlisle Floyd documents the distinguished career of one of our most beloved artists and teachers, with vivid descriptions of creative ideas transformed into the operas we know and love. Introducing a large cast of real characters central to the development of an American opera repertoire, Holliday captures the composer’s poetic insight into the medium’s essence."—Marc Scorca: President and CEO, Opera America
"Tom Holliday’s astonishingly comprehensive
biography of one of America’s preeminent
composers makes great reading
because it marries the private and the
professional, the trials and the triumphs of
a long and fascinating career."—Hal Prince, Tony Award–winning
producer and director
"Zealously researched, frank, and eminently readable,
Holliday’s book succeeds both as the chronicle of a great
artist’s life and as a revelatory exploration of the inner
workings of a grand art form."—Jesse Gram, Audience Education Manager, Lyric Opera of Chicago
"I have been consistently stunned by our great composer Carlisle Floyd’s comprehension and control
of musical, dramatic, transactional and psychological elements in his musical theater; and Thomas
Holliday’s rendition of these gifts is priceless."—Marni Nixon, award-winning singer and actress
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thomas Holliday has directed multiple productions of over fifty operas, operettas,
and musicals in Europe and the United States. He has worked as a composer,
conductor, opera educator, writer, and lecturer on operatic subjects.
|
Actors know about "falling up": a split-second ignition from the wings,
propelling entrance as a new character, an unwilled ascent to a different
mode of being, an in-body experience that overlays preparation, opportunity,
choice, or chance. Falling Up, the first and only full-length Floyd
study, is a metaphor for humanity’s uncanny ability to rise from seeming
disaster into rebirth. Floyd’s consistent succession of soars, stumbles,
slides, or wrenches sings of triumph over odds.
A modern Renaissance man, Floyd is our greatest living opera
composer and librettist, a trained concert pianist, a master stage director,
and a teacher. In Falling Up, Holliday offers an intimate account of the
life that shaped the words and music. Combining insights from hundreds
of interviews with Floyd, his family, and many of the last half-century’s
greatest singers, conductors, and opera administrators, Falling Up traces
Floyd’s Southern roots and the struggles and sacrifices that accompanied
his rise to operatic stardom.
With more than forty photographs, the detailed evolution of Floyd’s
fourteen operas, and in-depth analysis of his nonoperatic works, Falling
Up is essential reading for opera fans and professionals alike, a book
that moves, informs, and entertains.
8 1/2 x 11, 440 pages, 45 black-and-white illustrations,
appendix, notes, bibliography, index
|
|
|
