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.

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.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 1809) is renowned as one of the most eminent and prolific composers of the classical period of western music. By the end of his life he had become one of the most famous composers in Europe. He developed the musical forms which became the symphony and the string quartet and was also instrumental in the development of the sonata. This volume, first published in 1902 and written by biographer and contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography James Cuthbert Hadden (1861 1914), focuses on Haydn's career and personality rather than his music. Arranged chronologically according to major locations where Haydn visited or lived, Hadden describes Haydn's daily life, character and growing fame in great detail. Based on the first comprehensive biography of Haydn, Carl Ferdinand Pohl's Joseph Haydn, this volume was considered the most complete account of Haydn's life in English at the time of publication.

Timpani Tone and the Interpretation of Baroque and Classical Music explores the nature, production, and evolution of timpani tone and provides insights into how to interpret the music of J. S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. In drawing on 31 years of experience, Steven L. Schweizer focuses on the components of timpani tone and methods for producing it. In so doing, he discusses the importance of timpani bowl type; mallets; playing style; physical gestures; choice of drums; mallet grip; legato, marcato, and staccato strokes; playing different parts of the timpano head; and psychological openness to the music in effectively shaping and coloring timpani parts.
In an acclaimed chapter on interpretation, Schweizer explores how timpanists can use knowledge of the composer's style, psychology, and musical intentions; phrasing and articulation; the musical score; and a conductor's gestures to effectively and convincingly play a part with emotional dynamism and power. The greater part of the book is devoted to the interpretation of Baroque and Classical orchestral and choral music. Meticulously drawing on original sources and authoritative scores from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Schweizer convincingly demonstrates that timpanists were capable of producing a broader range of timpani tone earlier than is normally supposed. The increase in timpani size, covered timpani mallets, and thinner timpani heads increased the quality of timpani tone; therefore, today's timpanist's need not be entirely concerned with playing with very articulate sticks. In exhaustive sections on Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, Schweizer takes the reader on an odyssey through the interpretation of their symphonic and choral music.
Relying on Baroque and Classical performance practices, timpani notation, the composer's musical style, and definitive scores, he interprets timpani parts from major works of these composers. Schweizer pays particular attention to timpani tone, articulation, phrasing, and dynamic contouring: elements necessary to effectively communicate their part to listeners.

First published in 1986, this is the first of two volumes devoted to the evolution of the Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz from 1540 to 1750. This first volume traces the history of the dances from the time of the Renaissance to the Baroque period as they moved across the face of Europe. Volume II supplements the history with an anthology of musical compositions.

First published in 1986, this is the second of two volumes devoted to the evolution of the Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz from 1540 to 1750. Volume I traces the history of the dances from the time of the Renaissance to the Baroque period as they moved across the face of Europe. This second volume supplements the first by providing an anthology of musical compositions from Germany, France and the Low Countries, Italy, and England. All the compositions from one country or region are grouped together with full source attribution given at the end.

C. P. E. Bach Studies collects together nine wide-ranging essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century music. Offering fresh perspectives on one of the towering figures of the period, the authors explore Bach's music in its cultural contexts, and show in diverse and complementary ways the reciprocal relationship between Bach's work and contemporary literary, theological, and aesthetic debates. Topics include Bach's relation to theories of sensibility and the sublime; the free fantasy and concepts of self and being; and Bach's engagement with music history and the legacy of his predecessors. Wider questions of C. P. E. Bach reception also play an important part in the book, which explores not only the interpretation of Bach's music in his time, but also its reception over the two centuries since his death.

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.

This is the first book thoroughly to explore the musical style of Henry Purcell. In this comprehensive study, Martin Adams identifies music by other composers, both within England and from abroad, which influenced Purcell's compositional decisions. Using a mix of broad stylistic observation and detailed analysis, Adams distinguishes between late seventeenth-century English style in general and Purcell's style in particular and chronicles the changes in the composer's approach to the main genres in which he worked, especially the newly emerging ode and English opera. As a result, Adams reveals that although Purcell went through a marked stylistic development, encompassing an unusually wide range of surface changes, special elements of his style remained constant. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of music and theatre history and of British cultural and social history.

This book was the first comprehensive survey of Purcell's dramatic music. It is concerned as much with the London theatre world - playhouses, poets, actors, singers, producers - as with the music itself. Purcell wrote music for more than fifty plays of various types, most of them produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, between 1690 and 1695. The songs, dialogues, choruses, act tunes and larger musical scenes are often active participants in the spoken drama, not simply grafted-on entertainments. The extraordinary semi-operas - Dioclesian, King Arthur, and The Fairy-Queen - are placed in the context of a theatre that thrived mainly on plays that, though less lavish, were no less musical. The traditional picture of a composer trapped within a degraded musical society, his natural predilection for opera ignored, is redrawn to show a consummate dramatist exploiting a remarkably musical theatre.

This study recognizes the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture. Downing A. Thomas considers the use of operatic spectacle and music by Louis XIV as a vehicle for absolutism; the resistance of music to the aesthetic and political agendas of the time; and the long-term development of opera in eighteenth-century humanist culture. He argues that French opera moved away from the politics of the absolute monarchy in which it originated to address Enlightenment concerns with sensibility and feeling. The book combines close readings of significant seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century operatic works, circumstantial writings and theoretical works on theatre and opera, together with a measure of reception history. Thomas examines key works by Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, among others, and extends his reach from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.

In Bach's Germany musical counterpoint was an art involving much more than the sophisticated use of advanced compositional techniques. A range of theological, cultural, social and political meanings attached themselves to the use of complex procedures such as canon and double counterpoint. This book explores the significance of Bach's counterpoint in a range of interrelated contexts: its use as a means of reflecting on death; its parallels to alchemy; its vexed status in the galant music culture of the first half of the eighteenth century; its value as a representation of political power; and its central importance in the creation of Bach's image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Touching on a wide array of contemporary literary, philosophical, critical, and musical texts, the book includes new readings of many of Bach's late works in order to re-evaluate the status and meaning of counterpoint in Bach's work and legacy.

This volume of essays reflects the increasing breadth and scope of Bach research. The fifteen essays by American and European scholars address a wide range of topics and issues: Magnificat, Cantata, and Passion; Parody and Genre; The Well-Tempered Clavier; and Transmission and Reception. Many of the authors focus on works which due to the Bach chronology - can now be examined in a fresh light. Seen as a whole, the essays combine source - critical and analytic methods with historical and theological interpretation to consider problems of genesis and style, as well as questions of transmission and reception.

A monumental accomplishment from the age of Enlightenment, the string quartets of Joseph Haydn hold a central place not only in the composer's oeuvre, but also in our modern conception of form, style, and expression in the instrumental music of his day. Here, renowned music historians Floyd and Margaret Grave present a fresh perspective on a comprehensive survey of the works. This thorough and unique analysis offers new insights into the creation of the quartets, the wealth of musical customs and conventions on which they draw, the scope of their innovations, and their significance as reflections of Haydn's artistic personality. Each set of quartets is characterized in terms of its particular mix of structural conventions and novelties, stylistic allusions, and its special points of connection with other opus groups in the series. Throughout the book, the authors draw attention to the boundless supply of compositional strategies by which Haydn appears to be continually rethinking, reevaluating, and refining the quartet's potentials. They also lucidly describe Haydn's famous penchant for wit, humor, and compositional artifice, illuminating the unexpected connections he draws between seemingly unrelated ideas, his irony, and his lightning bolts of surprise and thwarted expectation. Approaching the quartets from a variety of vantage points, the authors correct many prevailing assumptions about convention, innovation, and developing compositional technique in the music of Haydn and his contemporaries.
Going beyond traditional modes of study, The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn blends historical analysis and factual information with critical appraisal in a way that will engage all Haydn enthusiasts.

This volume of essays on Jean-Baptiste Lully and his musical legacy honours the distinguished French baroque scholar James R. Anthony. Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to Louis XIV, served as the principal architect of what would become known as the French style of music in the baroque era. The style he created strongly influenced the great musical figures in England (Purcell and Handel) and Germany (Bach and Telemann), but Lully's music itself has received little attention. Recently, through the efforts of scholars and musicians concerned with the performance practices of Lully's time, Lully's own music has begun to come alive in performance and recording. These essays, all by important baroque specialists, cover significant aspects of Lully's life and works and the French tradition he influenced. They constitute the first post-war collection of studies centred on Lully and form a fitting tribute to Professor Anthony whose own French baroque music provided a stimulus for the work of an emerging generation of scholars.

1985 celebrated the 300th anniversary of the births of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti. This volume covers all three composers and contains essays from an international team of scholars. Some essays make a contribution towards a better understanding of one or other composer, but at least half of them are concerned with ideas connecting two or even all three of them. The essays are concerned with many aspects of the music - technical, chronological, critical, speculative, theoretical and (importantly) practical - and the distinguished contributors have often endeavoured to ask questions rather than jump to conclusions. Every essay makes fresh points and can open up new avenues for players and (in the broadest sense) students, especially in the present climate of wishing to return to 'authentic conditions of performance'.

Music master to Frederick the Great, Quantz was one of the great flute virtuosos of all time. He was also a thorough musician, a fine teacher and an excellent writer. This classic book is ostensibly a flute method, but it goes far beyond that, presenting a complete and detailed picture of musical taste and performance practice in the 18th century. Of special significance is a table relating various tempos to the speed of the pulse, helping modern musicians to solve the difficult question of authentic performance tempos of Baroque music. This reissued edition includes all Quantz's music examples together with an introduction and explanatory notes by the translator, Edward R. Reilly.

In considering the role of practical music in education, this book attempts to define the art of performance in Germany during the Baroque period. The author examines the large number of surviving treatises and instruction manuals used in the Lutheran 'Latin' schools during the period 1530-1800 and builds up a picture of the function and status of music in both school and church. The understanding, gained through these educational texts, of music as a functional art - musica practica - in turn gives us insight into the thoughts of the contemporary performer and how he might have performed the sacred work of Praetorius, Schutz, Buxtehude or Bach. For all those interested in historical performance this book provides valuable information on the growing science of performance practice and the development of a conscious awareness of style and idiom in this period.

Traditional musicology has tended to see the Spanish eighteenth century as a period of decline, but this 1998 volume shows it to be rich in interest and achievement. Covering stage genres, orchestral and instrumental music and vocal music (both sacred and secular), it brings together the results of research on such topics as opera, musical instruments, the secular cantata and the villancico and challenges received ideas about how Italian and Austrian music of the period influenced (or was opposed by) Spanish composers and theorists. Two final chapters outline the presence of Spanish musical sources in the New World.

This 1995 volume brings together essays on J. S. Bach and members of his family by a distinguished group of scholars. The essays address Bach's compositions, his knowledge of the musical past, his study of contemporaries, and the cultivation of his own music by later generations. The studies draw on source criticism, musical analysis, religious and social context, performance practice and reception history - a broad range of techniques and issues in Bach scholarship. The international contributors include both established scholars and newer voices in Bach studies. This volume will be indispensable for any future work on the Musical Offering, St Matthew Passion, Italian Concerto, on Bach's musical connections with his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann and on many other topics in Bach research.

This study is a comprehensive assessment of J. S. Bach's use of articulation marks (i.e. slurs and dots) in the large body of primary sources. Dr Butt analyses the role of such markings within the compositional process, how they relate to the norms of articulation of the period, and how they might assist us in a deeper understanding and evaluation of Bach's style. With its extensive catalogue of the most common slurring patterns based on a study of over 100 concerted vocal works, this book is invaluable both for performers on all baroque instruments, and for scholars with an interest in Bach's style and source studies. It also contributes to our perception of Bach's position in music history: the purpose of music in the Lutheran Germany of Bach's time and its rhetorical power; the close relationship between composer and performer within the context of 'practical' music; and the functions and development of notation.