This book examines formal organization in Haydn's symphonies. The structure of individual movements as well as the relationships between them are analysed in detail. All common instrumental forms of the Classical era (sonata, rondo, variations, and so forth) are discussed. The author reconstructs Haydn's principles of formal thought and explains how these principles governed his compositional choices.

A ground-breaking study of the rise of the catch and glee in Georgian England. The rise of the catch and glee in Georgian England represents a rare example of indigenous forms establishing themselves within a wide musical and social context. This study examines a phenomenon that has to date been largely overlooked by historians. Taking the 17th-century background as a starting point, it moves on to a detailed account of the clubs formed to propagate the two genres, placing them within the ambiance of the thriving club life of Londonand the provinces. The success of the London Catch Club and its emulators in encouraging the creation of a large and popular repertoire that would come to assume nationalistic significance is reflected by the incursion of the catch and glee into mainstream concert life and the theatre. The volume concludes with a discussion of the glee in relation to the aesthetics of the period and a brief survey of its subsequent reputation among musicians and historians.

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.

Beethoven's Lives will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding how Beethoven biography has evolved through the ages. When Ludwig van Beethoven died in March 1827, the world of music felt an intense loss. The composer's funeral procession was one of the largest Vienna had ever witnessed, and the poet Franz Grillparzer's eulogy brought the tensions between the composer's life and music into sharp focus: the deaf and aloof genius, the alienated and eccentric artist, unable to form a lasting relationship with a woman but reaching out to mankind. These apparent contradictionswere to attract many Beethoven biographers yet to come. Here, Lewis Lockwood, himself a much-lauded Beethoven biographer, tells the story of Beethoven biography, from the earliest attempts made directly after the composer's death to the present day. Beethoven's Lives casts a wide net, tracing the story of Beethoven biography from Anton Schindler as biographer and falsifier, through the authoritative Alexander Wheelock Thayer and down tothe present. The list includes Gustav Nottebohm, the first scholar to study Beethoven's sketchbooks. With his work, biography could begin to reflect on the inner life of the artist as expressed in his music, and in this sense, sketchbooks could be seen as artistic diaries. Even Richard Wagner thought of writing a Beethoven biography, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of French and English traditions of Beethoven biography. In the tumultuous twentieth century, with world wars and fractured politics, the writing of Beethoven biography was sometimes caught up in the storm. By bringing the story down to our time, Lewis Lockwood identifiestraditions of Beethoven biography that today's scholars and writers need to be aware of. As Lockwood shows, each biography reflects not only on the individual writer's knowledge and interests, but also his inner sense of purposeas each writer works within the intellectual framework of his time. LEWIS H. LOCKWOOD is one of the leading authorities on Beethoven worldwide. Having taught at Princeton and Harvard, some of his key Beethoven publications include: Beethoven: The Music and the Life (Norton, 2003; translated into many languages), as well as Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (Norton, 2015) and with the Julliard String Quartet: Inside Beethoven'sQuartets: History, Performance, Interpretation (Harvard University Press, 2008). He is known for his studies of Beethoven's life and work, including the composer's autograph manuscripts and sketchbooks.

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of Andre Ernest Modeste Gretry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Gretry's earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Gretry's appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Gretry's attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Gretry's work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina's Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop's String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne's "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music's death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.

It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase 'dead time' to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the problem further back to Beethoven's ninth symphony, a work which then proceeded to intimidate symphonists who followed in its composer's footsteps, including Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. In 1824 Beethoven set a standard that then had to rise in response to more demanding expectations from both audiences and the musical press. Christopher Fifield, who has a conductor's intimacy with the repertory, looks in turn at the five decades between the mid-1820s and mid-1870s. He deals only with non-programmatic works, leaving the programme symphony to travel its own route to the symphonic poem. Composers who lead to Brahms (himself a reluctant symphonist until the age of 43 in 1876) are frequently dismissed as epigones of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann but by investigating their symphonies, Fifield reveals their respective brands of originality, even their own possible influence upon Brahms himself and in so doing, shines a light into a half-century of neglected nineteenth century German symphonic music.

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.

Grounded in knowledge of thousands of programs, this book examines how musical life in London, Leipzig, Vienna, Boston, and other cities underwent a fundamental transformation in relationship with movements in European politics. William Weber traces how musical taste evolved in European concert programs from 1750 to 1870, as separate worlds arose around classical music and popular songs. In 1780 a typical program accommodated a variety of tastes through a patterned 'miscellany' of genres, held together by diplomatic musicians. This framework began weakening around 1800 as new kinds of music appeared, from string quartets to quadrilles to ballads, which could not easily coexist on the same programs. Utopian ideas and extravagant experiments influenced programming as ideological battles were fought over who should govern musical taste. More than a hundred illustrations or transcriptions of programs enable readers to follow Weber's analysis in detail.

* 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.

Following the author's acclaimed biographical dictionaries on Schubert and Mozart, Peter Clive here examines Beethoven's relations with the multitude of persons who formed his circle: relatives, friends, acquaintances, librettists, poets, publishers, artists, patrons, and musicians. With over 450 entries, this volume is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the subject currently available in any language. It will appeal to all music lovers, both the scholar and the non-specialist alike.

This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth century, Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778). Its purpose is three-fold. First, it provides a comprehensive biography and account of the performance and publication of Arne's works during his lifetime. Although Arne's childhood years get some attention, the book focuses on the period from 1732 to 1778, a time of great innovation for English opera and related genres. Second, it considers Arne's social context: his relationships with the many dramatists, actors, singers, and fellow composers and instrumentalists-including many members of his own family-with whom he collaborated on the London and Dublin stages as well as at the London pleasure gardens. Third, it offers analysis of eighty musical illustrations drawn from vocal works for the theatre spanning Arne's career, and readers can simultaneously study and listen to the musical examples on a companion web page that hosts media files produced using music notation software. The audio component constitutes a crucial supplement to a study of Arne because so much of his extant theatre music cannot otherwise readily be heard. Arne was the leading figure in English theatrical music of his day. Dr. Charles Burney, the great eighteenth-century historian of music, had a high opinion of the composer, especially of Arne's setting of Milton's Comus (1738): "In this masque he introduced a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had hitherto either pillaged or imitated. Indeed, the melody of Arne at this time . . . forms an era in English Music; it was so easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it [became] the standard of all perfection at our theatres and public gardens." Yet Burney's greatest compliment concerns Arne as a composer of secular vocal music: "He must be allowed to have surpassed [Purcell] in ease, grace, and variety." During his forty-six-year career Arne composed music for over 100 stage works-to say nothing of his myriad single songs, cantatas, and instrumental compositions. Yet despite a relative wealth of source material, scholars of theatre, drama, and music in our own time have almost completely ignored him. As a consequence, musicologists, theatre historians, and laypeople alike tend to evince a detrimentally limited sense of the magnitude of Arne's contribution to English music and especially to the history of English opera. To listen to musical examples that accompany The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne, please visit http://www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress/thomasarne.htm

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy-he toured the capitals of Europe while still a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills-he wrote as an adult some of the finest music in the entire European tradition. Julian Rushton offers a concise and up-to-date biography of this musical genius, combining a well-researched life of the composer with an introduction to the works-symphonic, chamber, sacred, and theatrical-of one of the few musicians in history to have written undisputed masterpieces in every genre open to composers of his time. Rushton offers a vivid portrait of the composer, ranging from Mozart the Wunderkind-travelling with his family from Salzburg to Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and Milan-to the mature author of such classic works as "The Marriage of Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "The Magic Flute". During the past half-century, scholars have thoroughly explored Mozart's life and music, offering new interpretations of his compositions based on their historical context and providing a factual basis for confirming or, more often, debunking fanciful accounts of the man and his work. Rushton takes full advantage of these biographical and musical studies as well as the definitive New Mozart Edition to provide an accurate account of Mozart's life and, equally important, an insightful look at the music itself, complete with musical examples. An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars, this new addition to the prestigious Master Musicians series offers an authoritative portrait of one of the defining figures of European culture.

This book takes as its historical point of departure the radical appearance in 1779 of technically difficult keyboard music in a set of six sonatas (Op. 2) by Muzio Clementi. The difficult passages contained in this opus are unique amongst keyboard music published for a market that was understood at the time to consist almost entirely of female amateur keyboardists. Previously actively discouraged from practicing or improving their skills due to the restrictive ideologies in place, Clementi's music increasingly affords female pianists a new kind of musical expression. Clementi and the woman at the piano: Virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London maps the social, musical, and gendered implications of technically difficult music and helps to underline important changes in Enlightenment culture and keyboard practice. Clementi's activities initiated the now familiar and modern concepts of repetitive musical practice, the work-concept, virtuosity itself, and the division between amateur and professional. Additionally, Clementi promotes a radical new mode of expression for female pianists that is at first highly controversial but slowly gains acceptance due to a widespread promotion of his music, instruments, and methods. Clementi's career is in many respects a perfect case study for the tensions between Enlightenment thinking and new Romantic ideologies.

Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.

In From Bach's Goldberg to Beethoven's Diabelli: Influence and Independence, music scholar and noted pianist Alfred Kanwischer gives readers an extended exploration in which each of Beethoven's 33 pieces that comprise the Diabelli Variations (Op. 120) is caringly examined and assessed for its ingredients, actions, personality, and influence on the whole. Counterpoint abounds, not only in the fugal variations, which are closely parsed, but throughout the Diabelli, revealing the noticeably Baroque character of the technical compositional devices Beethoven employs. Throughout his study, Kanwischer integrates comparisons with Bach's immortal Goldberg Variations. Both sets stand alone as among the greatest keyboard variations in the Western canon. During their creation, both composers were nearly the same age, at the zenith of their art, and in similarly felicitous frames of mind.Kanwischer underscores twenty essential similarities, from the use of melody and melodic outline and the comparability among variations in size, parallel design, ebullient outlook, increasing contrasts, daring virtuosic flights, Shakespearean blend of comic and tragic, and their respective cumulative rises to spiritual transcendence. From Bach's Goldberg to Beethoven's Diabelli takes readers on a journey of discovery that is lively and stimulating. It considers not only questions of influence but those of insight and understanding, offering a work useful not only as a reference but as a guide to performers, music instructors and devotees. This work also includes 70 visually annotated interpretive musical examples as aids to understanding.

String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe is the first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. It brings together the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre. Together, this book's chapters deal with compositional responses to Beethoven's string quartets and the prestige of the genre; varied compositional practices in string quartet writing, with a particular emphasis on texture and performance elements; and the reception of Beethoven's string quartets ca. 1800. They include discussions of quartets composed for the amateur and connoisseur markets in Beethoven's Europe; virtuosity, the French Violin School, and the quatuor brillant; the relationship between quartet composers and their audiences during Beethoven's era; and the cross-pollination of quartet styles in Europe's musical centers such as Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg.

This study of Franz Schubert's settings of poetry by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis introduces the fascinating world of early German Romanticism in the 1790s, when an energetic group of bold young thinkers radically changed the landscape of European thought. Schubert's encounters with early Romantic poetry some twenty years later reanimated some of the movement's central ideas. Schubert set eleven texts from Schlegel's AbendrAte poetic cycle and six poems drawn from Novalis' religious and erotic poetry. Through detailed analyses of how various musical structures in these songs mirror and sometimes even explicate the central ideas of the poems, this book argues that Schubert was an abstract thinker who used his medium of music to diagram the complex ideas of a highly intellectual movement. A comparison is made to the hermeneutic theory of that time, primarily that of Schleiermacher, who was himself linked to the early Romantics. Through exploration of ideas such as Schlegel's representation of the necessary interdependence of part and whole and Novalis' strong association of religious and erotic experience, along with their musical representations by Schubert, this book opens an intriguing world of thought for modern readers. At the same time, Feurzeig explores some of Schubert's little-known songs, which range from quirky to charming to exquisite.

Titles in the Listener's Companion Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume clearly explains how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Examining both the context in which the music appeared and its form, authors provide the environments in which key musical works were written and performed-from a 1950s bebop concert at the Village Vanguard to a performance of Handel's Messiah in eighteenth-century Dublin. Wolfgang Amade Mozart (1756-1791) remains as popular today as ever. His recordings fill iTunes playlists, and annual Mozart festivals are performed worldwide. His eminence as a musician has supported overseas guided tours, served as the subject of a cartoon series (Little Amadeus: twenty-nine episodes from 2006 to 2008), inspired movies and documentaries, and launched a French rock opera. In Experiencing Mozart: A Listener's Companion, music historian David Schroeder illustrates how the issues Mozart cared about so deeply remain important to modern listeners. His views on politics, women, authority, and religion are provided, along with compelling analysis of selected great symphonies and sonatas, moving concertos and innovative keyboard works, and groundbreaking operas. Schroeder merges his vast knowledge of the great artist's personal and professional life, late eighteenth-century European culture and society, and remarkable musicianship to guide listeners in the art of listening to Mozart. This work is an ideal introduction to readers and listeners at any level.

Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794-1854) was a legendary tenor and the first 19th-century non-castrati male singer to become an international star of opera. The previous two centuries had been the era of the castrati, with tenors and basses relegated to character and supporting roles in the operas of their time. Rubini stood apart because he not only matched the castrati in coloratura and pathos, but he also had an extraordinarily high voice. With Rubini's rise, and in his wake, several tenors came to sing roles written specifically for them by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and many other lesser-known bel canto composers. Signaling the end of the dominance of castrati on stage, this period would last some forty years until the advent of grand opera, Wagner, and Verdi and the appearance of the first so-called High C from the chest by Gilbert-Louis Duprez in 1837. Since then, the accepted tenor sound has followed the tradition epitomized by Enrico Caruso and, in our own era, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Many composers, conductors, and performers would come to regard bel canto dramatic operas as decorative and vapid until Maria Callas and Tulio Serafin demonstrated the heights this genre of opera could reach. However, opera directors and opera performers of late who have expressed an interest in reviving selected masterpieces from the bel canto tradition have found themselves confronted with the problem of locating tenors versed in the vocal techniques necessary to carry the high tessituras. In Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors: History and Technique, Dan H. Marek explores the extraordinary life of Rubini in order to frame this special period in the history of opera and connect the technique of the castrati who were among Rubini's instructors. Drawing on the work of Berton Coffin, Marek offers long-sought answers to the challenges presented by high tessitura of bel canto operas for tenors. To further assist working singers, Giovanni Battista Rubini and the Bel Canto Tenors includes over sixty pages of exercises written by Rubini himself before 1840, which Marek, for the first time ever, has adapted to acoustical phonetics. Professional singers, teachers and their students, vocal coaches, and opera conductors will find this work indispensable as the only English-language work on high tessitura for tenor and soprano singing.

A Conductor's Guide to the Choral-Orchestral Works of the Classical Period, Part I: Haydn and Mozart is the fourth volume in Jonathan Green's innovative study of the vast body of choral-orchestral repertoire. A treasure-trove for conductors of choir and orchestras, in this volume all of the masses, oratorios, cantatas, litanies, vespers, and minor sacred works of Haydn and Mozart are carefully examined. For each work, the author has compiled the text source, duration, date of composition, date and place of premiere, location of manuscript materials, commercially available editions, a selected discography, a bibliography, and a brief history of the work. Most importantly, the performance concerns for the choir, orchestra, and soloists of each work are evaluated and described. This will prove to be an invaluable programming aid for conductors and a touchstone for anyone embarking on research into this music.

The operatic culture of late eighteenth-century Naples represents the fullest expression of a matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs linking aristocratic, public and religious spheres of contemporary society. The considerable resonance of 'Neapolitan' opera in Europe was verified early in the eighteenth century not only through voluminous reports offered by locals and visitors in gazettes, newspapers, correspondence or diaries, but also, and more importantly, through the rich and tangible artistic patrimony produced for local audiences and then exported to the Italian peninsula and abroad. Naples was not simply a city of entertainment, but rather a cultural epicenter and paradigm producing highly innovative and successful genres of stage drama reflecting every facet of contemporary society. Anthony R. DelDonna provides a rich study of operatic culture from 1775-1800. The book demonstrates how contemporary stage traditions, stimulated by the Enlightenment, engaged with and responded to the changing social, political, and artistic contexts of the late eighteenth century in Naples. It focuses on select yet representative compositions from different genres of opera that illuminate the diverse contemporary cultural forces shaping these works and underlining the continued innovation and European recognition of operatic culture in Naples. It also defines how the cultural milieu of Naples - aristocratic and sacred, private and public - exercises a profound yet idiosyncratic influence on the repertory studied, the creation of which could not have occurred elsewhere on the Continent.

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is an in-depth examination of the rich repertoire of choral music and the cultural phenomenon of choral music making throughout the period. The book is divided into three main sections. The first details the attraction to choral singing and the ways it was linked to different parts of society, and to the role of choral voices in the two principal large-scale genres of the period: the symphony and opera. A second section highlights ten choral-orchestral masterworks that are a central part of the repertoire. The final section presents overview and focus chapters covering composers, repertoire (both small and larger works), and performance life in an historical context from over a dozen regions of the world: Britain and Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latin America, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and Finland, Spain, and the United States. This diverse collection of essays brings together the work of 25 authors, many of whom have devoted much of their scholarly lives to the composers and music discussed, giving the reader a lively and unique perspective on this significant part of nineteenth-century musical life.