Many books have been written about Beethoven but it is rare to find one which seeks an alternative to the tendency of academia, on the one hand, to fragmentation, and of popular biographical writing, on the other, to a superficial overview. In this volume, the late Carl Dahlhaus combines the interpretations of individual works with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800, an age which was not only a `classical' period in the history of the arts but also one in which aesthetics carved itself a place in the centre of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's `musical thinking' from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas. A table entitled `Chronicle' places the references to biographical data in their historical context. The selective bibliography includes comments to assist readers to find their way in the labyrinth of the literature about Beethoven.

**WINNER of Presto Books' Best Composer Biography** NINE WORKS OF BEETHOVEN, NINE WINDOWS INTO THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF A MUSICAL GENIUS. 'We are doubly blessed that Beethoven should have led such an extraordinary life. Laura has combined the two - the genius of his music and the richness of his experiences - to shine a revealing light on our greatest composer' John Humphrys _________________________ Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths. In Beethoven, Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise. With each chapter focusing on a period of his life, piece of music and revealing theme - from family to friends, from heroism to liberty - she provides a rich insight into the man and the music. Revealing a wealth of never-before-seen material, this tour de force is a compelling, accessible portrayal of one of the world's most creative minds and it will transform how you listen for ever. _________________________ 'Tunbridge has come up with the seemingly impossible: a new way of approaching Beethoven's life and music . . . profoundly original and hugely readable' John Suchet, author Beethoven: The Man Revealed 'This well researched and accessible book is a must read for all who seek to know more about the flesh and blood tangible Beethoven.' John Clubbe, author of Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary 'This book is really wonderful! ... However many books on Beethoven you own, find the space for one more. This one' Stephen Hough, pianist, composer, writer 'In a year when everyone's looking for a new take on Beethoven, Laura Tunbridge has found nine. Fresh and engaging' Norman Lebrecht, author of Genius and Anxiety 'Remarkable . . . she captures the essence of his genius and character. I'll always want to keep it in easy reach' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the third Reich

Beethoven's habit of composing by making large numbers of preliminary drafts and sketches was sufficiently unusual to attract attention even during his lifetime, and his creative process has attracted a good deal more attention since. The present book incorporates the findings of recent studies on this fascinating subject as well as providing many additional new insights. It adds considerably to our understanding of one of the greatest figures in the history of our culture.

Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was twenty-four years old, and the opera was described by Albert Einstein as 'one of those works that even a genius like Mozart could write only once in his life'. It is one of most astonishing achievements of an altogether astonishing career. In this newly commissioned guide, Julian Rushton explains the special nature of the music in a detailed analysis of its themes and development, while Nicholas Till places the opera in its context as an expression of the Enlightenment. Gary Kahn explores the performance history of an opera which, although largely ignored for over a hundred and fifty years, has now taken its place as part of the international operatic repertoire. A selection of the unique letters between Mozart and his father written during the opera's composition is also included.

Brahms in Context offers a fresh perspective on the much-admired nineteenth-century German composer. Including thirty-nine chapters on historical, social and cultural contexts, the book brings together internationally renowned experts in music, law, science, art history and other areas, including many figures whose work is appearing in English for the first time. The essays are accessibly written, with short reading lists aimed at music students and educators. The book opens with personal topics including Brahms's Hamburg childhood, his move to Vienna, and his rich social life. It considers professional matters from finance to publishing and copyright; the musicians who shaped and transmitted his works; and the larger musical styles which influenced him. Casting the net wider, other essays embrace politics, religion, literature, philosophy, art, and science. The book closes with chapters on reception, including recordings, historical performance, his compositional legacy, and a reflection on the power of composer myths.

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.

Considered by many the world's greatest composer, Ludwig van Beethoven achieved his ambitions against the difficulties of a bullying and drunken father, growing deafness and mounting ill-health. Here, Anne Pimlott Baker tells the story of the German composer's life and work, from his birth in Bonn in 1770 and his early employment as a court musician, to his death in Vienna in 1827. She describes his studies with Haydn in Vienna and his work during the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. His most financially successful period followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815, despite several unhappy love affairs and continuous worry over his nephew, Karl. Beethoven is a concise, illuminating biography of a true virtuoso.

Only recently has it become obvious that conductors' annotated scores and marked orchestral parts are of great cultural, historical and musical importance. In the not-so-distant past, these artefacts had something of an uncertain status with many either languishing unopened in libraries and family archives or simply being dispersed or discarded. With the help of institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, Harvard University and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra this has begun to change with their extensive collections of these materials now being made available to scholars and musicians. This element examines the emergence of these artefacts as didactic and interpretative tools and explores the ways in which the performance styles of ten iconic conductors active in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries are reflected in their annotated scores and marked orchestral parts of Mozart's Symphony No. 41, K. 551 ('Jupiter').

Whereas Dr Burney's writings are often mentioned in studies on eighteenth-century music, not much interest seems to have been given specifically to his relation to the organ, which played an important part in his professional career as a practising musician. No better introduction to the aesthetic ethos of the eighteenth-century English organ can be found than in Burney's remarks disseminated in his various writings. Taken together, they construct a coherent discourse on taste and constitute an aesthetic. Burney's view of the organ is indicative of a broader ethos of moderation that permeates his whole work, and is at one with the dominant moral philosophy of Georgian England. This conception is ripe with patriotic undertones, while it also articulates a constant plea for politeness as a condition for harmonious social interaction. He believed that moderation, simplicity, and fancy were the constituents of good taste as well as good manners.

Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schubert's Winterreise by approaching it from multiple angles. Part I examines the political, cultural, and musical environments in which Winterreise was created. Part II focuses on the poet Wilhelm Muller, his 24-poem cycle Die Winterreise, and changes Schubert made to it in fashioning his musical setting. Part III illuminates Winterreise by exploring its relation to contemporaneous understandings of psychology and science, and early nineteenth-century social and political conditions. Part IV focuses more directly on the song cycle, exploring the listener's identification with the cycle's protagonist, text-music relations in individual songs, Schubert's compositional 'fingerprints', aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycle's relation to German Romanticism. Part V concentrates on Winterreise in the nearly two centuries since its completion in 1827, including lyrical and dramatic performance traditions, the cycle's influence on later composers, and its numerous artistic reworkings.

Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schubert's Winterreise by approaching it from multiple angles. Part I examines the political, cultural, and musical environments in which Winterreise was created. Part II focuses on the poet Wilhelm Muller, his 24-poem cycle Die Winterreise, and changes Schubert made to it in fashioning his musical setting. Part III illuminates Winterreise by exploring its relation to contemporaneous understandings of psychology and science, and early nineteenth-century social and political conditions. Part IV focuses more directly on the song cycle, exploring the listener's identification with the cycle's protagonist, text-music relations in individual songs, Schubert's compositional 'fingerprints', aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycle's relation to German Romanticism. Part V concentrates on Winterreise in the nearly two centuries since its completion in 1827, including lyrical and dramatic performance traditions, the cycle's influence on later composers, and its numerous artistic reworkings.

Anselm Gerhard explores the origins of "grand opera, arguing that its aesthetic innovations (both musical and theatrical) reflected not bourgeois tastes, but changes in daily life and psychological outlook produced by the rapid urbanization of Paris. These larger urban and social concerns--crucial to our understanding of nineteenth-century opera--are brought to bear in fascinating discussions of eight operas composed by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Louise Bertin."
""An invaluable look at this fascinating genre."--George W. Loomis, Opera News"

The music of early modern Naples and its renowned artistic traditions remain a fruitful area for scholars in eighteenth-century studies. Contemporary social, political, and artistic conditions had stimulated a significant growth of music, musicians and culture in the Kingdom of Naples from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera is well documented in scholarship, historians have paid much less attention to the simultaneous cultivation of instrumental genres. Yet the culture of instrumental music grew steadily and by its end became an exclusive area of focus for the royal court, a remarkable departure from past norms of patronage. By bridging this gap, Anthony R. DelDonna brings together diverse fields, including historical musicology, music theory, Neapolitan and European history. His book investigates the wide-ranging role of instrumental genres within late eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture and introduces readers to new material, including recently discovered instrumental works of Paisiello, Cimarosa and Pleyel.

This collection of articles, written by European, American and British scholars, clarifies problems of style and chronology in the music Schubert composed during the last decade of his life. Althought O. E. Deutsch's documentary biography and memoirs set new milestones in Schubert research, they left some problems of chronology unanswered. Some of the essays in this volume examine or re-examine these problems, using different methods. Robert Winter, in the longest essay, proposes numerous re-datings of works composed between 1822 and 1828 which result from a careful examination of types of paper and watermarks. Other contributors point out the limitations of applying stylistic criteria as the basis for the dating of individual works. The articles touch on all areas of Schubert's output, with the emphasis on his songs, theatre music, and orchestral and chamber works. Althought this book will be of primary interest to musicologists, and others interested in Schubert, the essays concerned with song and the theatre will also attract a wider readership.

(Vocal Collection). Both published keys are combined, especially for teacher reference, in this convenient, value priced collection.

for solo cello
Includes twelve easy arrangements of pieces by famous composer of the Classical and Romantic periods.

In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

Mozart's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781-1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's professional persona and his modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians, audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic practices and traditions. Giving particular prominence to primary sources, Simon P. Keefe offers new biographical and critical perspectives on the man and his music, highlighting his extraordinary ability to engage with the competing demands of singers and instrumentalists, publishing and public performance, and concerts and dramatic productions in the course of a hectic, diverse and financially uncertain freelance career. This comprehensive and accessible volume is essential for Mozart lovers and scholars alike, exploring his Viennese masterpieces and the people and environments that shaped them.

The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People's Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin's Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China-now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

Franz Liszt was preoccupied with a fundamental but difficult question: what is the content of music? His answer lay in his symphonic poems, a group of orchestral pieces intended to depict a variety of subjects drawn from literature, visual art and drama. Today, the symphonic poems are usually seen as alternatives to the symphony post-Beethoven. Analysts stress their symphonic logic, thereby neglecting their 'extramusical' subject matter. This book takes a different approach: it returns these influential pieces to their original performance context in the theatre, arguing that the symphonic poem is as much a dramatic as a symphonic genre. This is evidenced in new analyses of the music that examines the theatricality of these pieces and their depiction of voices, mise-en-scene, gesture and action. Simultaneously, the book repositions Liszt's legacy within theatre history, arguing that his contributions should be placed alongside those of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner.

The Piano Player: Classical Favourites presents 20 of the most popular pieces of classical music, specially arranged for intermediate solo piano. Contents include Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, Fantasia on Greensleeves by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Un bel di, vedremo by Giacomo Puccini. The striking cover features Edward Bawden's colour linocut Aesop's Fables: Daw in Borrowed Feathers, 1970, and a double-side colour print provides the full artwork as a beautiful collectible. The Piano Player series includes six wonderful collections of some of the greatest classical music ever written, specially arranged for the intermediate pianist, each with its own collectible pull-out poster of the stunning Edward Bawden cover artwork.

Chopin's oeuvre holds a secure place in the repertoire, beloved by audiences, performers, and aesthetes. In Harmony in Chopin, David Damschroder offers a new way to examine and understand Chopin's compositional style, integrating Schenkerian structural analyses with an innovative perspective on harmony and further developing ideas and methods put forward in his earlier books Thinking about Harmony (Cambridge, 2008), Harmony in Schubert (Cambridge, 2010), and Harmony in Haydn and Mozart (Cambridge, 2012). Reinvigorating and enhancing some of the central components of analytical practice, this study explores notions such as assertion, chordal evolution (surge), collision, dominant emulation, unfurling, and wobble through analyses of all forty-three Mazurkas Chopin published during his lifetime. Damschroder also integrates analyses of eight major works by Chopin with detailed commentary on the contrasting perspectives of other prominent Chopin analysts. This provocative and richly detailed book will help transform readers' own analytical approaches.

Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the 'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues that the music that the composer produced from 1822-8 is central to a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more recent literature.