Millions of opera fans tune in faithfully to the Metropolitan Opera's famous Saturday radio series. One of the program's highlights occurs during the first intermission, when invited speakers offer live, stimulating commentary on the opera aired that day. And for the last twelve years one of the most popular guests on this program has been M. Owen Lee, a Catholic priest and classics scholar, who has emerged as a brilliant and engaging speaker with a gift for making opera relevant to modern concerns. Now, in First Intermissions, Father Lee presents twenty-one of his finest radio talks, illuminating some of the best loved operas in the current repertoire, including masterworks by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss. This is a book that brims with opera lore, with the love of fine music, and with an abundance of good humor. Father Lee writes brilliantly about the music itself, offering insights into composition that even a novice can grasp and enjoy. But for Father Lee, opera is more than beautiful music. Opera is about the human condition, our capacity for good and evil, our unconscious thoughts and conscious actions, our sorrows and our joys, our stories, our myths, and our personal triumphs and tragedies. It is great art confronting life head on: the conflict between fathers and children in Verdi, the irreversibility of time in Strauss, or the quest for self-realization in Wagner. Father Lee brings the real story of opera to life--great stories that make us see beyond the plot and feel the music as a blow to the heart. What also strikes the reader about Father Lee's style is that it is very intimate, not only sprinkled with personal anecdotes (such as saving pennies in Depression-era Detroit to buy sheet music from Sears and Roebuck), but informed throughout by his open-hearted response to opera's magic. Father Lee's love of opera shines through these pieces, and his enthusiasm is contagious, sending readers straight to their record collections--or the nearest record store--to savor once again the marvels of opera. When Father Owen Lee first appeared on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, he was given two criteria. "I could say anything I pleased," he recalls, "so long as (1) it was instantly intelligible to the little old lady in Dubuque and the little old gentleman in Des Moines and (2) it was something no one anywhere, of either sex or any age, had ever thought of before." Whether discussing Puccini's La Boheme or Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier or Gounod's Faust, Father Lee remains utterly original and always in touch with the little old lady in Dubuque.

First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life From the Met

Arts & Photography

Lee, M. Owen

Music

Oxford University Press

Millions of opera fans tune in faithfully to the Metropolitan Opera's famous Saturday radio series. One of the program's highlights occurs during the first intermission, when invited speakers offer live, stimulating commentary on the opera aired that day. And for the last twelve years one of the most popular guests on this program has been M. Owen Lee, a Catholic priest and classics scholar, who has emerged as a brilliant and engaging speaker with a gift for making opera relevant to modern concerns. Now, in First Intermissions, Father Lee presents twenty-one of his finest radio talks, analyzing some of the best loved operas in the current repertoire, including masterworks by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss. This is a book that brims with opera lore, with the love of fine music, and with an abundance of good humor. Father Lee writes brilliantly about the music itself, offering insights into composition that even a novice can grasp and enjoy. But for Father Lee, opera is more than beautiful music. Opera is about the human condition, our capacity for good and evil, our unconscious thoughts and conscious actions, our sorrows and our joys, our stories, our myths, and our personal triumphs and tragedies. It is great art confronting life head on: the conflict between fathers and children in Verdi, the irreversibility of time in Strauss, or the quest for self-realization in Wagner. Father Lee brings the real story of opera to life--great stories that make us see beyond the plot and feel the music as a blow to the heart. What also strikes the reader about Father Lee's style is that it is very intimate, not only sprinkled with personal anecdotes (such as saving pennies in Depression-era Detroit to buy sheet music from Sears and Roebuck), but informed throughout by his open-hearted response to opera's magic. Father Lee's love of opera shines through these pieces, and his enthusiasm is contagious, sending readers straight to their record collections--or the nearest record store--to savor once again the marvels of opera. When Father Owen Lee first appeared on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, he was given two criteria. "I could say anything I pleased," he recalls, "so long as (1) it was instantly intelligible to the little old lady in Dubuque and the little old gentleman in Des Moines and (2) it was something no one anywhere, of either sex or any age, had ever thought of before." Whether discussing Puccini's La Boheme or Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier or Gounod's Faust, Father Lee remains utterly original and always in touch with the little old lady in Dubuque.

Commentary on and a concise, lucid interpretation of the opera world's most complex masterwork, expanded from the author's popular intermission talks during Met Opera broadcasts.

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round: Commentaries on the Ring of the Nibelung

Summit Books

Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia is an introduction to the Eclogues, based on sound scholarship but also personally felt and addressed to a popular audience. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of Virgil's early poems, discusses each eclogue in some detail, and offers a new and challenging interpretation of the collection as a whole. The ten eclogues are shown to be a young poet's attempt at self-understanding. Their symmetrical arrangement is a journey inward toward the central experience of death, and a journey back toward rebirth and the writing of larger and greater works.

Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia (Suny Series in Classical Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

State Univ of New York Pr

Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia is an introduction to the Eclogues, based on sound scholarship but also personally felt and addressed to a popular audience. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of Virgil’s early poems, discusses each eclogue in some detail, and offers a new and challenging interpretation of the collection as a whole. The ten eclogues are shown to be a young poet’s attempt at self-understanding. Their symmetrical arrangement is a journey inward toward the central experience of death, and a journey back toward rebirth and the writing of larger and greater works.

State University of New York Press

Presents a popular introduction to Virgil's Georgics for the general reader. Though John Dryden once called the Georgics “the best Poem of the best Poet,” and Montaigne thought it the most highly finished work in all of poetry, Virgil’s song of the earth has never won as many readers as has his Aeneid, and at present it is the subject of more debate among classicists than perhaps any other poem in Latin. Using a Jungian approach, this book draws on the new commentaries in English as well as on the work of the great German Virgilians of the past, and is written in the eloquent, accessible, and personal style for which its author has become known. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of the poem, discusses the sound of Virgil’s hexameters, and treats each of the four georgics in detail, with special emphasis on the concluding myth of Orpheus. The most baffling of all Latin poems is shown in these pages to be Virgil’s gift to Augustus, the most powerful man in the world as the salvational leader of the renewed Roman state, telling him what he must know about nature and about human nature if he is to rule the world well.

Virgil as Orpheus: A Study of the Georgics (Classical Studies (Dis))

In The Olive-Tree Bed and Other Quests, the fourth in the series of Robson Lectures published by the University of Toronto Press, Father Lee studies the quest myth as it occurs in Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Wagner's Parsifal and Goethe's Faust. Though the four works represent four different genres - oral epic, written epic, music drama, and poetic drama - each deals with the finding of an elusive goal attainable only by the hero called to find it. The questing for the olive-tree bed, the Golden Bough, the Holy Grail, and the Eternal Feminine is, at the deepest level, the hero's search to find the meaning in his life. Though Father Lee's lectures address critical problems in the four works, and draw to some extent on Jungian insights, this volume is also a personal memoir written in the belletristic style for which its author has become known. Father Lee wears his learning lightly, and his writing changes from chapter to chapter as it reflects, in turn, the clarity and naïve sense of wonder in Homer, the darkness and ambivalence in Virgil, the intuitive mysticism of Wagner, and the riotously imaginative exuberance of Goethe. Each of the four quests comes eventually to be seen as every person's search to discover himself - for the journey of the hero is the myth each of us is called to live.

Olive-Tree Bed and Other Quests (Robson Classical Lectures)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Father Owen Lee is internationally known for his intermission commentaries featured during the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne gathers together for the first time Father Lee's best broadcast and cassette commentaries, public lectures, and articles on twenty-three works for the musical stage. The essays range from the pioneering Orpheus of Monteverdi to the forward-looking Ariadne of Richard Strauss. 
Included are Father Lee's famous discussions of Mozart's Magic Flute and Beethoven's Fidelio, Verdi's La Traviata and Falstaff, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. The concluding chapter, originally published as the lead article in The Opera Quarterly's special issue on the end of the twentieth century, is a thought-provoking forecast of opera's future. Recommendations for further reading, CD recordings, and videos are also included.
Opera Canada has applauded Father Lee's 'extraordinary ability to engage, challenge, and enlighten a vast and diverse audience' and called his learning-worn-lightly commentaries 'a unique mix of spiritual empathy, classical scholarship, and psychological insight.' Opera lovers, or anyone interested in psychology and mythology, humanities and comparative literature, or the art of the essay will welcome this book.

A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne

Humor & Entertainment

How is it possible for a seriously flawed human being to produce art that is good, true, and beautiful. Why is the art of Richard Wagner, a very imperfect man, important and even indispensable to us?In this volume, Father Owen Lee ventures an answer to those questions by way of a figure in Sophocles - the hero Philoctetes. Gifted by his god with a bow that would always shoot true to the mark, and indispensable to his fellow Greeks, he was marked by the same god with an odious wound that made him hateful and hated. Sophocles's powerful insight is that those blessed by the gods and indispensable to men are visited as well with great vulnerability and suffering.Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politics - on Eliot and Proust as well as on Adolf Hitler - and discusses in detail Wagner's Tannhauser, the work in which the composer first dramatised the Faustian struggle of a creative artist in whom 'two souls dwell.' In the course of this penetrating study, Father Lee argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.

Wagner: Terrible Man & His Truthful Art

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lee, M. Owen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lee, M. Owen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lee, M. Owen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life From the Met

First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life From the Met

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round: Commentaries on the Ring of the Nibelung

Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia (Suny Series in Classical Studies)

Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia (Suny Series in Classical Studies)

Virgil as Orpheus: A Study of the Georgics (Classical Studies (Dis))

Virgil as Orpheus: A Study of the Georgics (Classical Studies (Dis))

Olive-Tree Bed and Other Quests (Robson Classical Lectures)

A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne

Wagner: Terrible Man & His Truthful Art