Francis Edward Bache (1833 58) and his younger brother Walter (1842 88) were active during a rich period of musical life in Britain. The Philharmonic Society and Crystal Palace concerts in London, the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, and the Birmingham and Three Choirs festivals were all well established, while celebrated composer/conductors from Berlioz to Wagner and virtuosi including violinist Joseph Joachim and pianist Anton Rubinstein were in great demand. Edward, a pupil of Sterndale Bennett, was a promising organist and composer whose potential was tragically ended by his early death from tuberculosis. Walter, a pupil of Liszt from 1862 to 1865, became a dedicated promoter of the pianist/composer's music to the British concert-going public through annual concerts that he financed. First published in 1901, this affectionate account of the brothers' lives by their sister Constance (1846 1903) includes many letters as well as lists of Edward's compositions and Liszt's orchestral works performed at Walter's concerts.

The premiere of Otello, Giuseppe Verdi's only new opera for over a decade, was a much-anticipated event in Milan in February 1887, and musical talents from all over Europe had vied for the chance to be part of it. An American author and former opera singer, Blanche Roosevelt (1853 98) took an assignment as a special correspondent in Milan during the weeks surrounding the opera's premiere at La Scala. She was well connected in the artistic community and personally acquainted with Verdi himself, and her dispatches paint an informed and vivid picture of the city and its musical and literary scene in the late 1880s. Published in 1887, along with a short biography of Verdi, anecdotes, illustrations, and reminiscences of conversations with the composer, these writings will appeal to both music scholars and opera lovers.

The American music critic and lecturer William James Henderson (1855 1937) wrote for The New York Times and The New York Sun, provided the libretto for Walter Damrosch's opera Cyrano (1913) and authored fiction, poetry, sea stories and a textbook on navigation. He also taught at the New York College of Music and the Institute of Musical Art. Taking up the cause of Wagner with considerable understanding, he published this substantial work in 1902, barely twenty years after the composer's death. It is an illuminating account of Wagner's life and artistic aims, complemented by an insightful analysis of each of his music dramas from Rienzi to Parsifal. Its purpose, states Henderson, 'is to supply Wagner lovers with a single work which shall meet all their needs'. With Ernest Newman's Study of Wagner (1899), also reissued in this series, it reflects the composer's contemporary popularity.

From Chaplin's brilliant use of Wagner in The Gold Rush to the Bach chorale closing Scorsese's Casino, classical music has played a fascinating role in movies. Dean Duncan provides a fresh critical survey of the aesthetics of classical music in film. Exploring tensions between high art and commercial culture, Duncan examines how directors quote themes and classical passages in genres ranging from the Soviet avant garde to Hollywood romances. Drawing on film theory, musicology, and cultural criticism, he clarifies the connections between two very different art forms.

The second volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt.

"You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed." D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books

"A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire." Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal

"What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival." Elliot Ravetz, Time

"The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections." Library Journal"

Presenting a fresh picture of the life and work of Joseph Haydn, this biography captures all the complexities and contradictions of the composer's long career. In his lifetime Haydn achieved a degree of fame that easily surpassed that of Mozart and Beethoven. Later his historical significance was more restricted, regarded exclusively as the composer who first recognised the potential of the symphony and the quartet. However, Haydn had also composed operas, oratorios and church music with similar enthusiasm and self-regard. Too easily buttonholed as a Viennese composer, he interacted consistently with the musical life of Vienna only during the earliest and latest periods of his life; London was at least as important in fashioning the composer's fame and legacy. To counter the genial view of the composer, this biography probes the darker side of Haydn's personality, his commercial opportunism and double dealing, his penny-pinching and his troubled marriage.

Heinrich Schenker ranks among the most important figures in the development of western music theory in the twentieth century. His approach to the analysis of music permeates nearly every aspect of the field and continues to this day to be a topic of great interest among music theorists, historians, composers and performers. In his four volume work, Die letzen Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung und Erlauterung (The Last Piano Sonatas by Beethoven: Critical edition with Introduction and Commentary) Schenker presented editions of Beethoven's Opp. 109, 110, 111 and 101 that were, at the time, unprecedented in their faithfulness to such authoritative sources as Beethoven's autograph manuscripts. He included a movement-by-movement and section-by-section discussion of form and content that grew increasingly penetrating from one volume to the next as the musical theory for which he is now known was developed, alongside inspired and detailed suggestions for the performance of each section of each work. InBeethoven's Last Piano Sonatas: An Edition, with Elucidation, noted Schenker scholar John Rothgeb presents the first English language edition and translation of these important works. Rothgeb builds upon Schenker's text, adding explanations of certain points in the commentary, references to corrections and other remarks entered by Schenker in his personal copies of the volumes, and graphic presentations of several passages (a practice that became standard in Schenker's own analytical work later in his career). Making these seminal works accessible to English speaking scholars and students for the first time, Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas is an essential reference for music theorists, historians, performers, and composers alike.

A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes Brahms

The 1997 centennial of Brahms's death has intensified interest among concertgoers and music lovers in the composer's prodigious body of work. For all those eager to delve more deeply into Brahms's music, The Compleat Brahms is an indispensable companion. In a single volume that covers every work written by Brahms, leading scholars from across the country provide details of each work's composition and discuss its important stylistic features. Interspersed are fascinating essays — such as "Brahms, Joachim, and the Schumanns" — that bring the composer and his contemporaries to life. Much more than a collection of program notes, The Compleat Brahms vividly portrays the work and world of one of the giants of Western music history.

Music was central to everyday life and expression in late Georgian Britain, and this interdisciplinary study looks at its impact on Romantic literature. Focusing on the public fascination with virtuoso performance, Gillen D'Arcy Wood documents a struggle between sober 'literary' virtue and luxurious, effeminate virtuosity that staged deep anxieties over class, cosmopolitanism, machine technology, and the professionalization of culture. A remarkable synthesis of cultural history and literary criticism, this book opens new perspectives on key Romantic authors - including Burney, Wordsworth, Austen and Byron - and their relationship to definitive debates in late Georgian culture.

Historians of French politics, art, philosophy and literature have long known the tensions and fascinations of Louis XV's reign, the 1750s in particular. David Charlton's study comprehensively re-examines this period, from Rameau to Gluck and elucidates the long-term issues surrounding opera. Taking Rousseau's Le Devin du Village as one narrative centrepiece, Charlton investigates this opera's origins and influences in the 1740s and goes on to use past and present research to create a new structural model that explains the elements of reform in Gluck's tragedies for Paris. Charlton's book opens many new perspectives on the musical practices and politics of the period, including the Querelle des Bouffons. It gives the first detailed account of intermezzi and opere buffe performed by Eustachio Bambini's troupe at the Paris Opera from August 1752 to February 1754 and discusses Rameau's comedies Platee and Les Paladins and their origins.

Written by ten leading scholars, this 2008 volume assembles studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music under the broad rubric of communication. That such an impulse motivates musical composition and performance in this period of European musical history is often acknowledged but seldom examined in depth. The book explores a broad set of issues, ranging from the exigencies of the market for books and music in the eighteenth century through to the deployment of dance topoi in musical composition. A number of close readings of individual works by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven draw on a sophisticated body of historically-appropriate technical resources to illuminate theories of form, metre, bass lines and dance topoi. Students and scholars of music history, theory and analysis will find in this volume a set of challenging, state-of-the-art essays that will stimulate debate about musical meaning and engender further study.

Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation as one of the towering figures of Western music history. This lively collection builds upon this resurgence of interest, with chapters exploring the nature of Haydn's invention and the cultural forces that he both absorbed and helped to shape and express. The volume addresses Haydn's celebrated instrumental pieces, the epoch-making Creation and many lesser-known but superb vocal works including the Masses, the English canzonettas and Scottish songs and the operas L'isola disabitata and L'anima del filosofo. Topics range from Haydn's rondo forms to his violin fingerings, from his interpretation of the Credo to his reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from his involvement with national music to his influence on the emerging concept of the musical work. Haydn emerges as an engaged artist in every sense of the term, as remarkable for his critical response to the world around him as for his innovations in musical composition.

This book was first published in 2009. This fascinating study of ethnic theatrical representation provides original perspectives on the cultural milieu, compositional strategies and operatic legacy of Joseph Haydn. The portrayal of Jews changed markedly during the composer's lifetime. Before the Enlightenment, when Jews were treated as a people apart, physical infirmities and other markers of 'difference' were frequently caricatured on the comedic stage. However, when society began to debate the 'Jewish Question' - understood in the later eighteenth century as how best to integrate Jews into society as productive citizens - theatrical representations became more sympathetic. As Caryl Clark describes, Haydn had many opportunities to observe Jews in his working environments in Vienna and Eisenstadt, and incorporated Jewish stereotypes in two early works. An understanding of Haydn's evolving approach to ethnic representation on the stage provides deeper insight into the composer's iconic wit and humanity, and to the development of opera as a cultural art form across the centuries.

* Dismisses traditional, chronological format designed around European western canon to meets needs of today's ethnically diverse students, who identify their heritage as Asian, African, or Central American rather than European * Builds on a series of chapter-long theme-oriented narratives such as ethnicity, gender, spirituality, love, technology, that interweave the musical "here and now" * Focuses on how music creates and reflects social meaning in a variety of cultures and time periods. * Leads the student from music or ideas with which they are familiar to music that is unfamiliar, always through the connecting thread of the original social concept.

Michael Kelly (1762-1826) was an Irish singer and composer who studied music in a Naples conservatory before touring Europe and performing for royalty. His voyage to Italy began with a brush with pirates, one of whom was a childhood acquaintance. Kelly also found himself stranded penniless in Venice, spent a night in prison after a fist fight at the theatre, and had a narrow escape from revolutionary France. He is probably best remembered for creating the roles of Don Basilio and Don Curzio in the first performance, in 1786, of Le Nozze di Figaro, of which he describes the rehearsal period and reception. He later joined London's Theatre Royal as both a performer and composer and opened a music shop, which went bankrupt. These memoirs, published in 1826, provide rich first hand insights into a key period in theatre history. Volume 1 covers Kelly's early life and musical training.

Michael Kelly (1762-1826) was an Irish singer and composer who studied music in a Naples conservatory before touring Europe and performing for royalty. His voyage to Italy began with a brush with pirates, one of whom was a childhood acquaintance. Kelly also found himself stranded penniless in Venice, spent a night in prison after a fist fight at the theatre, and had a narrow escape from revolutionary France. He is probably best remembered for creating the roles of Don Basilio and Don Curzio in the first performance, in 1786, of Le Nozze di Figaro, of which he describes the rehearsal period and reception. He later joined London's Theatre Royal as both a performer and composer and opened a music shop, which went bankrupt. These memoirs, published in 1826, provide rich first-hand insights into a key period in theatre history. Volume 2 covers Kelly's later musical and theatrical career.

For over 150 years the concept of "sonata form" lay at the heart of European instrumental music. Now, in Elements of Sonata Theory, musicologist James Hepokoski and music theorist Warren Darcy rethink its basic principles. Considering not only sonatas but also chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos, their study outlines a new, updated paradigm for understanding the compositional choices present in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. It also lays down an indispensable foundation for those working with later adaptations and deformations of these musical structures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Combining insightful research and analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, these original perspectives provide a creative approach to the exploration of meaning within a familiar repertory. The authors map out the background terrain of historical norms at work in this music and provide a flexible mode of analysis for perceiving and assessing what happens--or what does not happen--in any given piece. They guide readers through the formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also introducing new ideas for understanding the ordering of musical modules over an entire movement and, more broadly, over an entire multimovement composition.
The product of over a dozen years of research, Elements of Sonata Theory is the most thorough study of the sonata ever undertaken. It serves as a challenge both to students and to experienced musicologists and music theorists to rethink how sonata form is best understood.

Originally published in 1986, this book is a major study in English on Gretry and opera-comique. Opera-comique is the operatic genre that lies behind The Magic Flute and Fidelio. David Charlton's important study examines the genre in the period before the French Revolution, considering the literary sources, performance conditions, contemporary aesthetic criteria and statistics which reveal the popularity of such works at that time. Dr Charlton takes Gretry, composer of some thirty-four operas-comiques, and a fascinating personality of his day, as the central figure of his study, drawing on Gretry's extensive Memoires and other writing, not available in English translation, for the biographical sections. Twenty-four of Gretry's operas-comiques are given a chapter each, with plot summary, critical discussion, summary of different versions and history of performance in Paris. The book can thus be used as a reference tool or read as a comprehensive survey of opera-comique between 1768 and 1791.

Hector Berlioz (1803-69) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation whose music was in many ways ahead of its time. He was also a respected journalist and critic. Begun in 1848, his celebrated Memoires were completed by 1865 but published posthumously in 1870. They are the best-known of his writings and reflect the man - passionate, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give a fascinating, first-hand, insight into his life. He shares his uncompromising thoughts on his contemporaries and the musical establishment in France, writes candidly about his love affairs and engagingly on his music and travels. This first English translation from the original French, published in 1884, will appeal to the music lover and the general reader. Volume 1 (1803-41) includes his childhood in the Isere, studies in Paris, struggles to establish himself and travels in Italy during 1831-2.

Hector Berlioz (1803-69) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation whose music was in many ways ahead of its time. He was also a respected journalist and critic. Begun in 1848, his celebrated Memoires were completed by 1865 but published posthumously in 1870. They are the best-known of his writings and reflect the man - passionate, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give a fascinating, first-hand, insight into his life. He shares his uncompromising thoughts on his contemporaries and the musical establishment in France, writes candidly about his love affairs and engagingly on his music and travels. This first English translation from the original French, published in 1884, will appeal to the music lover and the general reader. Volume 2 (1842-65) includes an engaging account, assembled from previously published material and presented as letters to friends, of travels to Germany and Russia.

The first volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt.

"You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed." D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books

"A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire." Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal

"What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival." Elliot Ravetz, Time

"The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections." Library Journal"

Beethoven composed far more folksong settings than any other type of composition. Most are British songs, including Auld Lang Syne and the The Miller of Dee , with text by such authors as Burns, Byron and Scott. Yet Beethoven's settings, commissioned by George Thomson of Edinburgh, have been neglected by performers and scholars alike, and nearly all accounts of them are both superficial and startlingly inaccurate. This book is based on a very elablorate study of a wide range of sources, and dispels the many myths that have been circulating about this music. Every one of the 179 settings is dated to within a few weeks and an account is given of the souces of the melodies and texts, the difficulties of sending the music across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars (smugglers were even called upon to assist!), the fees Beethoven received, and when and how the texts were added. By comparing Beethoven's settings with those of his predecessors Pleyel, Haydhn and Kozeluch, the author demonstrates that Beethoven comprehensively transcended the bounds of convention, producing settings of extra-ordinary quality and originality. This book is intended for scholars, students, and those interested i

How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Mozart, Haydn, Anfossi, Piccinni and Paisiello, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera. Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on the European cultural reception of American social and political identity. Through detailed but accessible analysis of music examples, including previously unpublished musical sources, the book documents and explains important transformations of opera at the time of Mozart's masterpieces, and its long-term consequences up to Puccini. Shedding new light on familiar and less-familiar operatic works, the study represents groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.

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.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an anomaly risks minimizing his impact. In this book, Adeline Mueller examines how Mozart shaped the social and cultural reevaluation of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment. Whether in a juvenile sonata printed with his age on the title page, a concerto for a father and daughter, a lullaby, a musical dice game, or a mass for the consecration of an orphanage church, Mozart's music and persona transformed attitudes toward children's agency, intellectual capacity, relationships with family and friends, political and economic value, work, school, and leisure time. Thousands of children across the Habsburg Monarchy were affected by the Salzburg prodigy and the idea he embodied: that childhood itself could be packaged, consumed, deployed, "performed"-in short, mediated-through music. This book builds upon a new understanding of the history of childhood as dynamic and reciprocal, rather than a mere projection or fantasy-as something mediated not just through texts, images, and objects but also through actions. Drawing on a range of evidence, from children's periodicals to Habsburg court edicts and spurious Mozart prints, Mueller shows that while we need the history of childhood to help us understand Mozart, we also need Mozart to help us understand the history of childhood.