Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a prolific letter writer. Often written in great haste - he regularly signed off 'in der Eile' - his correspondence allows us to follow his anxieties and preoccupations. From his first letter, written at the age of thirteen, wherein he declared his lifelong commitment to the craft of music, through the poignant 'Heiligenstadt Testament', up to the final codicil to his will, these documents reveal the human figure behind some of the greatest music ever written. In this two-volume English translation of 1909, John South Shedlock (1843-1919) retains as far as possible the idiosyncratic and error-ridden texts as written by the great composer. Spanning the period 1816-27, Volume 2 finds Beethoven concerned over his financial situation and the poor printing of his music, and includes the final codicil to his will, written just three days before his death.

Excerpt: ...I afterwards took him sharply to task for this; I gave him no quarter, and upbraided him with all his sins, especially towards you, my dear friend, as we had just been speaking of you. Heavens if I could have lived with you as he did, believe me I should have produced far greater things. A musician is also a poet, he too can feel himself transported into a brighter world by a pair of fine eyes, where loftier spirits sport with him and impose heavy tasks on him. What thoughts rushed into my mind when I first saw you in the Observatory during a refreshing May shower, so fertilizing to me also 2 The most beautiful themes stole from your eyes into my heart, which shall yet enchant the world when Beethoven no longer directs. If God vouchsafes to grant me a few more years of life, I must then see you once more, my dear, most dear friend, for the voice within, to which I always listen, demands this. Spirits may love one another, and I shall ever woo yours. Your approval is dearer to me than all else in the world. I told Goethe my sentiments as to the influence praise has over men like us, and that we desire our equals to listen to us with their understanding. Emotion suits women only; (forgive me ) music ought to strike fire from the soul of a man. Ah my dear girl, how long have our feelings been identical on all points The sole real good is some bright kindly spirit to sympathize with us, whom we thoroughly comprehend, and from whom we need not hide our thoughts. He who wishes to appear something, must in reality be something. The world must acknowledge us, it is not always unjust; but for this I care not, having a higher purpose in view. I hope to get a letter from you in Vienna; write to me soon and fully, for a week hence I shall be there. The Court leaves this to-morrow, and to-day they have another performance. The Empress has studied her part thoroughly. The Emperor and the Duke wished me to play some of my own music, but I refused, for they...

Excerpt: ...I afterwards took him sharply to task for this; I gave him no quarter, and upbraided him with all his sins, especially towards you, my dear friend, as we had just been speaking of you. Heavens if I could have lived with you as he did, believe me I should have produced far greater things. A musician is also a poet, he too can feel himself transported into a brighter world by a pair of fine eyes, where loftier spirits sport with him and impose heavy tasks on him. What thoughts rushed into my mind when I first saw you in the Observatory during a refreshing May shower, so fertilizing to me also 2 The most beautiful themes stole from your eyes into my heart, which shall yet enchant the world when Beethoven no longer directs. If God vouchsafes to grant me a few more years of life, I must then see you once more, my dear, most dear friend, for the voice within, to which I always listen, demands this. Spirits may love one another, and I shall ever woo yours. Your approval is dearer to me than all else in the world. I told Goethe my sentiments as to the influence praise has over men like us, and that we desire our equals to listen to us with their understanding. Emotion suits women only; (forgive me ) music ought to strike fire from the soul of a man. Ah my dear girl, how long have our feelings been identical on all points The sole real good is some bright kindly spirit to sympathize with us, whom we thoroughly comprehend, and from whom we need not hide our thoughts. He who wishes to appear something, must in reality be something. The world must acknowledge us, it is not always unjust; but for this I care not, having a higher purpose in view. I hope to get a letter from you in Vienna; write to me soon and fully, for a week hence I shall be there. The Court leaves this to-morrow, and to-day they have another performance. The Empress has studied her part thoroughly. The Emperor and the Duke wished me to play some of my own music, but I refused, for they...

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A popular and generous figure on the Cambridge academic scene, Sedley Taylor (1834 1920) used his proficiency both in music and in European languages to render Continental musical scholarship accessible to British readers. In this book, originally published in 1906, Taylor draws on the work of Chrysander and Seiffert to display clearly the influence on Handel by a number of lesser-known composers including Habermann, Kerl and Clari. Handel's musical inspirations were the subject of much debate, with Samuel Wesley accusing him of 'establishing a Reputation wholly constituted upon the spoils of the Continent'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in musical history and the contested originality of Handel."

Using novels and autobiographies from Bach's Germany, Stephen Rose suggests new ways of interpreting the lives and social status of musicians. This study focuses on satirical novels written by musicians that describe the lives of performers and composers, as well as the autobiographies of Bach's contemporaries. These narratives represent musicians variously as picaresque outcasts, honourable craft-workers, foolish bunglers and respected virtuosos. They probe the lives of musicians considered taboo or aberrant in the period, such as street entertainers and Italian castratos. The novels and autobiographies also reveal two major debates that shaped the mindset and social identity of musicians: was music a sensual or rational craft, and should musicians integrate within society or be regarded as outsiders? Quoting from an array of little-known novels, this book shows how an interdisciplinary approach can transform our understanding of Bach and his contemporaries.

Although a well-connected music teacher by profession, Charles Burney (1726 1814) gained greatest recognition for his writings on music. In this 1773 work, reissued here in its 1775 second edition, Burney recounts the 1772 journey that he undertook as one of two research trips for his General History of Music (1776 89). Throughout his travels, he was welcomed by the leading musicians of the day and heard many performances of the latest music. The whole account provides an invaluable first-hand insight into European musical life in the eighteenth century. Burney's General History and The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1772), the record of his first tour, are also reissued in this series. Volume 1 includes his visits to Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt, and to Vienna where he spent considerable time with the librettist Metastasio and the composers Hasse and Gluck."

Although a well-connected music teacher by profession, Charles Burney (1726 1814) gained greatest recognition for his writings on music. In this 1773 work, reissued here in its 1775 second edition, Burney recounts the 1772 journey that he undertook as one of two research trips for his General History of Music (1776 89). Throughout his travels, he was welcomed by the leading musicians of the day and heard many performances of the latest music. The whole account provides an invaluable first-hand insight into European musical life in the eighteenth century. Burney's General History and The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1772), the record of his first tour, are also reissued in this series. Volume 2 includes his visit to Potsdam to hear Frederick the Great's flute playing, and to Hamburg where he was welcomed by C. P. E. Bach."

This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or even rejecting his art, his life illustrates how music-making was always also a negotiation for power. Providing a rare glimpse of the social and political contexts of seventeenth-century music, Roger Freitas sheds light on the mechanisms that generated meaning for music, clarifying what music at this time actually was.

Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

The author and clergyman William Coxe (1748-1828), noted for his travel works, was the stepson of Handel's amanuensis, German-born John Christopher Smith (1712-95). First published in 1799, the present work is a valuable source of first-hand information about two men at the heart of eighteenth-century English music: George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), whose inventive and sensitive melodic genius and exuberant brilliance in depicting the spectacular are best displayed in his Messiah and Zadok the Priest, and Smith, a composer of attractive and fashionable music, who settled in London in 1720, took lessons with Handel and later supported the great composer as his eyesight failed. Smith was also organist at the Foundling Hospital until 1770. This publication, profits from which were intended to support Smith's family, draws on the works of John Hawkins and Charles Burney, and on anecdotes claimed to be 'derived from unquestionable authority'.

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 1 covers Mozart's life to 1778, including tours with his father and employment under Archbishop Colloredo."

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 2 covers Mozart the man, the break with Colloredo, his move to Vienna, marriage, and Freemasonry."

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 3 discusses the Mozart Da Ponte operas and the Requiem, and also includes a list of his works."

Admired and studied by both Mozart and Beethoven, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) imbued his life-enhancing compositions with wit, elegance and deep emotion. His output was prolific and included symphonies (most notably those written during his two visits to London, where he received a rapturous welcome), string quartets, chamber music, piano sonatas and choral works. This concise biography, first published in 1884, forms part of music critic Francis Hueffer's Great Musicians series, which was intended to provide succinct accounts of popular composers for the general reader. The author, Pauline D. Townsend, drew much of her material for the book from the painstaking research on Haydn published by the German musicologist Carl Ferdinand Pohl, archivist and librarian of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. A list of Haydn's works forms an appendix, based on the information in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, it is considered by many to be the composer's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they comprise a thorough and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigour for which Bach scholarship has become known.

Beloved not only in Britain, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) is admired as a composer the world over. His inventive and sensitive melodic genius and his exuberant brilliance in depicting the spectacular are best displayed in his Messiah and Zadok the Priest. Larger than life, Handel impressed all who met him and was adept at promoting his works, arranging for their publication and even selling them from his home in London's Brook Street. His dogged determination to triumph over the many reverses of his career and the fickle enthusiasms of the Georgian public is the stuff of three-volume novels. This sympathetic and highly readable biography by the composer and author William Smith Rockstro (1823-95) was first published in 1883. Wherever possible, autograph manuscripts have been consulted and the book contains the first detailed catalogue of Handel's output. Among other works, Rockstro's biography of Mendelssohn is also reissued in this series.

Cynthia Verba's book explores the story of music's role in the French Enlightenment, focusing on dramatic expression in the musical tragedies of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. She reveals how his music achieves its highly moving effects through an interplay between rational design, especially tonal design, and the portrayal of feeling and how this results in a more nuanced portrayal of the heroine. Offering a new approach to understanding Rameau's role in the Enlightenment, Verba illuminates important aspects of the theory-practice relationship and shows how his music embraced Enlightenment values. At the heart of the study are three scene types that occur in all of Rameau's tragedies: confession of forbidden love, intense conflict and conflict resolution. In tracing changes in Rameau's treatment of these, Verba finds that while he maintained an allegiance to the traditional French operatic model, he constantly adapted it to accommodate his more enlightened views on musical expression.

Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this 2010 book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief. While the historical details of Bach's composition, performance and theological context remain crucial, the foremost concern of this study is to relate these works to a historical context that may, in some threads at least, still be relevant today. The central claim of the book is that the interplay of traditional imperatives and those of early modernity renders Bach's Passions particularly fascinating as artefacts that both reflect and constitute some of the priorities and conditions of the western world.

All 21 sets of Beethoven's variations, including the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, Thirty-Two Variations in C Minor, the Eroica Variations, Op. 35, plus variations on themes by Dressler, Salieri, Sussmayr, Righini, other composers. Reprinted from the authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel edition.

This was the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689-1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eighteenth century to seek work beyond the Alps in locations such as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna. First published in 1999, the book investigates the careers of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists. However, it also considers key themes such as social and friendship networks, itinerancy, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, the evolution of taste, the role of gender in the reception of art, the diversity of modes and genres, and the reception of Italian artists and performers outside Italy.

Using novels and autobiographies from Bach's Germany, Stephen Rose suggests new ways of interpreting the lives and social status of musicians. The study focuses on satirical novels written by musicians that describe the lives of performers and composers, as well as the autobiographies of Bach's contemporaries. These narratives represent musicians variously as picaresque outcasts, honourable craft-workers, foolish bunglers and respected virtuosos. They probe the lives of musicians considered taboo or aberrant in the period, such as street entertainers and Italian castratos. The novels and autobiographies also reveal two major debates that shaped the mindset and social identity of musicians: was music a sensual or rational craft, and should musicians integrate within society or be regarded as outsiders? Quoting from an array of little-known novels, this book shows how an interdisciplinary approach can transform our understanding of Bach and his contemporaries.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698 1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726 1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 1 covers Metastasio's life from his early childhood until 1751, including his musical debut in Rome after his tutor's death, and the beginning of his career in Vienna.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726-1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 2 covers Metastasio's successful Viennese career from 1751 to 1770, and includes the bulk of his correspondence with his friend the famous castrato Farinelli.

This three-volume biography, first published in 1796, recounts the colourful life of the popular Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782), better known by his pseudonym Metastasio. Charles Burney (1726-1814), a British composer and the author of a celebrated four-volume History of Music published between 1776 and 1789, interweaves his own accounts of the poet's life with Metastasio's original letters translated into English. Metastasio's posthumously published correspondence with his friends and patrons provides the essential thread to understanding his complex life and affairs. The son of a shopkeeper, Metastasio was adopted as a young boy by the director of the Arcadian Academy, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, who was charmed by the child's extraordinary talent for improvising poetry. Volume 3 covers Metastasio's life and correspondence from 1770 until his death. It includes notes on Metastasio's style as well as separate chronologies of his secular dramas and oratorios.