**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

This book charts the piano's accession from musical curiosity to cultural icon, examining the instrument itself in its various guises as well as the music written for it. Both the piano and piano music were very much the product of the intellectual, cultural and social environments of the period and both were subject to many influences, directly and indirectly. These included character (individualism), the vernacular ('folk/popular') and creativity (improvisation), all of which are discussed generally and with respect to the music itself. Derek Carew surveys the most important pianistic genres of the period (variations, rondos, and so on), showing how these changed from their received forms into vehicles of Romantic expressiveness. The piano is also looked at in its role as an accompanying instrument. The Mechanical Muse will be of interest to anyone who loves the piano or the period, from the non-specialist to the music postgraduate.

The life and music of Beethoven still fascinate classical music lovers, new and old. His many symphonies, sonatas, concertos, string quartets, and his one opera enchant audiences, challenge performers, engage students, and support scholars in their work. In Experiencing Beethoven, music historian Geoffrey Block explores in layman's terms a highly representative body of about two dozen Beethoven instrumental and vocal works, offering listeners who know him well, or are just discovering him, an opportunity to grasp the breadth and depth of his musical genius. Designed for those unversed in musical terminology or theory, Experiencing Beethoven places the composer's works within the evolving context of his personal and professional life and social and cultural milieu. Block sheds light on the public and private audiences of Beethoven's music, from the concerts for the composer's own financial benefit to the debut of the "Eroica" Symphony at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz to the historic public premiere of his Ninth Symphony. Experiencing Beethoven paints a portrait of the composer's youth in Bonn, his early triumphs and artistic maturation in Vienna, and-despite the challenges his music posed to his contemporaries- the recognition he received during his lifetime as the most acclaimed composer of the era. Block conveys the range and scope of Beethoven's achievement, from his heroic style to his lyricism, grappling throughout with the composer's power to communicate his idealistic musical vision to listeners in both his time and ours. Finally, Experiencing Beethoven explores why Beethoven's music continues to enjoy an unwavering appeal in an age saturated with a range of musical styles.

This new gathering of the world's greatest classical themes follows Bergerac's highly successful "My First Book of Classical Music." Here are ever-popular themes from the symphonies, concertos, and operas of such masters as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and many others. For children and beginners of any age. Dover Original.

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

This four-volume anthology contains a sparkling selection of pieces and represents all the major composers of the period. It includes pieces in all the main genres, with Cornet and Trumpet Voluntaries, Echo Voluntaries, fugal works with slow introductions, and Full Voluntaries; as such, the collection offers a wide range of attractive music suitable for both church and recital use. Each volume contains an extended Introduction, with information on instruments of the period, registration, ornamentation, and notes on the composers. An important feature of the collection is an editorial realization of the cadenzas which occur at key points in some of the pieces; these complete the works and demonstrate how they would have been performed at the time. With extended historical information and a wonderful array of pieces carefully edited from original sources, this is a major collection that will be of interest to organists of all abilities.

This four-volume anthology contains a sparkling selection of pieces and represents all the major composers of the period. It includes pieces in all the main genres, with Cornet and Trumpet Voluntaries, Echo Voluntaries, fugal works with slow introductions, and Full Voluntaries; as such, the collection offers a wide range of attractive music suitable for both church and recital use. Each volume contains an extended Introduction, with information on instruments of the period, registration, ornamentation, and notes on the composers. An important feature of the collection is an editorial realization of the cadenzas which occur at key points in some of the pieces; these complete the works and demonstrate how they would have been performed at the time. With extended historical information and a wonderful array of pieces carefully edited from original sources, this is a major collection that will be of interest to organists of all abilities.

This four-volume anthology contains a sparkling selection of pieces and represents all the major composers of the period. It includes pieces in all the main genres, with Cornet and Trumpet Voluntaries, Echo Voluntaries, fugal works with slow introductions, and Full Voluntaries; as such, the collection offers a wide range of attractive music suitable for both church and recital use. Each volume contains an extended Introduction, with information on instruments of the period, registration, ornamentation, and notes on the composers. An important feature of the collection is an editorial realization of the cadenzas which occur at key points in some of the pieces; these complete the works and demonstrate how they would have been performed at the time. With extended historical information and a wonderful array of pieces carefully edited from original sources, this is a major collection that will be of interest to organists of all abilities.

This four-volume anthology contains a sparkling selection of pieces and represents all the major composers of the period. It includes pieces in all the main genres, with Cornet and Trumpet Voluntaries, Echo Voluntaries, fugal works with slow introductions, and Full Voluntaries; as such, the collection offers a wide range of attractive music suitable for both church and recital use. Each volume contains an extended Introduction, with information on instruments of the period, registration, ornamentation, and notes on the composers. An important feature of the collection is an editorial realization of the cadenzas which occur at key points in some of the pieces; these complete the works and demonstrate how they would have been performed at the time. With extended historical information and a wonderful array of pieces carefully edited from original sources, this is a major collection that will be of interest to organists of all abilities.

In 1912 Heinrich Schenker contracted with the Viennese publisher Universal Edition to provide an 'elucidatory edition' (ErlAuterungsausgabe) of Beethoven's last five piano sonatas. Each publication would comprise a score, newly edited by Schenker and using the composer's autograph manuscript as principal source, together with a substantial commentary combining analytical, text-critical and performance-related matter. Four of the five editions appeared between 1913 and 1921, but that of the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, op. 106, was never published. It has generally been assumed that this was simply because Schenker was unable to locate the autograph manuscript, which remains missing to this day. But as Nicholas Marston shows in a detailed history of the ErlAuterungsausgabe project, other factors were involved also, including financial considerations, Schenker's health concerns, and his broader theoretical ambitions. Moreover, despite the missing autograph he nevertheless developed a voice-leading analysis of the complete sonata during the years 1924-1926, a crucial period in the development of his mature theory of tonal music. Marston's book provides the first in-depth study of this rich analysis, which is reproduced in full in high-quality digital images. The book draws on hundreds of letters and documents from Schenker's NachlaAY; it both adds to our biographical knowledge of Schenker and illuminates for the first time the response of this giant of music theory to one of the most significant masterworks in all music.

In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp-a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience-that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.

Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts.

This collection of essays addresses a very broad range of E. T. A. Hoffmann's most significant works, examining them through the lens of "transgression." Transgression bears relevance to Hoffmann's life and professions in three ways. First, his official career path was that of jurisprudence; he was active as a lawyer, a judge and eventually as one of the most important magistrates in Berlin. Second, his personal life was marked by numerous conflicts with political and social authorities. Seemingly no matter where he went, he experienced much chaos, grief and impoverishment in leading his always precarious existence. Third, his works explore characters and concepts beyond the boundaries of what was considered aesthetically acceptable. "Normal" bourgeois existence was often juxtaposed to the lives of criminals, sinners, and other deviants, both within the spaces of the known world as well as in supernatural realms. He, perhaps more than any other author of the German Romantic movement, regularly portrayed the dark side of existence in his works, including unconscious psychological phenomena, nightmares, somnambulism, vampirism, mesmerism, Doppelganger, and other forms of transgressive behavior. It is the intention of this volume to provide a new look at Hoffmann's very diverse body of work from numerous perspectives, stimulating interest in Hoffmann in English language audiences.

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn's career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven's, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies--including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays--that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of "pure" music. Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism. Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection--composers' treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad--could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.

Marching to the Canon examines the history of Schubert's Marche militaire no.1 from its beginnings, through its many arrangements, to its impact on dance, literature, film, and music. Marche militaire is Franz Schubert's most recognizable and beloved instrumental work. Originally published for piano four hands in 1826, this tuneful march -- Schubert's first of three military marches -- was arranged, adapted, and incorporated into new incarnations over the next two centuries. Its success was due to its chameleonlike ability to cross the still-porous borders between canonic and popular repertories, creating a performance life thatmade deep inroads into dance, literature, and film, and inspired quotations or allusions in other music Marching to the Canon examines the history of Schubert's storied Marche militaire from its modest beginnings as aduet published for domestic consumption to its now-ubiquitous presence. After detailing the composition, publication, and reception of the original march, the book analyzes the impact of transcriptions and arrangements for solo piano, orchestra, band, and other settings. In addition, it considers the ways the march was used symbolically, even manipulated, during the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars, as well as the diverse creative uses of the piece by significant figures as varied as Willa Cather, Isadora Duncan, Walt Disney, and Igor Stravinsky. This study of the reception and impact of the Marche militaire offers a unique narrative illuminating the world that enshrined this remarkable score as one of the most memorable musical works of the nineteenth century. Scott Messing is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and the author of two works available from theUniversity of Rochester Press: Neoclassicism in Music and the two-volume Schubert in the European Imagination.

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music.
Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the second volume Richard Taruskin's monumental history, illuminates the explosion of musical creativity that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining a wealth of topics, Taruskin looks at the elegant masques and consort music of Jacobean England, the Italian concerto style of Corelli and Vivaldi, and the progression from Baroque to Rococo to romantic style. Perhaps most important, he offers a fascinating account of the giants of this period: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States. BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC BOOK RELEASE OF 2019 by Classical-music.com, the official website of BBC Music Magazine. 2019 SUMMER READS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2019 BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST in both the History and Performing Arts categories, sponsored by American Book Fest. 2019 SUBVENTION AWARD by the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to its shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a darker story of American immigration. Less well-known, however, is the treatment of German-Americans and Germannationals in the United States during World War I. Initially accepted and even welcomed into American society at the outbreak of war, this group would face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria. Melissa D. Burrage's book illustrates this dramatic shift in attitude in her engrossing narrative of Dr. Karl Muck, the celebrated German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was targeted and ultimately disgraced by a New York Philharmonic board member and by capitalists from that city who used his private sexual life as a basis for having him arrested, interned, and deported from the United States. While the campaign against Muck made national headlines, and is the main focus of this book, Burrage also illuminates broader national topics such as: Total War; State power; vigilante justice; internment and deportation; irresponsible journalism; sexual surveillance; attitudes toward immigration; anti-Semitism; and the development of America's musical institutions. The mistreatment of Karl Muck in the United States provides a narrative thread that connects these various wartime and postwar themes. MELISSAD. BURRAGE, a former writing consultant at Harvard University Extension School, holds a Master's Degree in History from Harvard University and a PhD in American Studies from University of East Anglia. Support for thispublication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has flourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social, and political context has vastly increased. This volume explores opera and operatic life of the years 1750-1800 through a selection of articles intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety.

Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810-16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.

Giovanni Battista Viotti was unquestionably the most influential violinist of his time, and his style continues to pervade to the present day. The last great representative of the Italian tradition that Corelli began, Viotti is often considered the founder of the modern or 19th-century French school of violin playing. In Amico: The Life of Giovanni Battista Viotti, author Warwick Lister provides the first complete biography in English of this continuously significant violinist. Much of the documentary material Lister cites is previously unknown or not translated. Lister's biography takes the reader on a fascinating journey over the European continent and into the musical culture of the late 18th century. Born one year prior to Mozart and dying three years before Beethoven's death, Viotti rose from the humble origins of a blacksmith's son in a village near Turin, Italy, to international fame. His multifarious career as a concert performer, composer, teacher, opera theater director, and impresario was played out against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world - he served as a court musician for no less a figure than Marie Antoinette before founding an opera house in Paris. Viotti also knew tragedy as well as success: he was forced to flee the French Revolution, he was exiled from England for an extended period based on suspicions of certain Jacobin tendencies, his attempt to establish himself in business met with failure, and he died heavily in debt. Lister concludes Amico by coming to grips with the very things that account for Viotti's greatness and influence: the technical aspects of his violin playing and compositions. With its extensive documentary research and the inclusion of translations of various archival documents, this is the essential English-language biography of Viotti, a significant addition to the libraries of students and scholars of 18th and early 19th century music, as well as violin performers, students, and instructors.

Following his much-acclaimed The Baroque Clarinet and The Clarinet in the Classical Period, Albert R. Rice now turns his signature detailed attention to large clarinets - the clarinet d'amour, the basset horn, the alto clarinet, bass and contra bass clarinets.
Each chapter is devoted to a specific instrument, and offers a fascinating insider's look at its defining characteristics, a comprehensive history of its evolution, meticulously-researched information on its makers and aspects of construction, and a thorough discussion of its music. Rice illustrates how the introduction of large clarinets into chamber ensembles, wind bands, and opera orchestras was the result of experiments meant to address specific musical needs. Along the way, he brings to life the musicians, virtuosi, soloists, and orchestral and band musicians, as well as the instruments' makers and the composers from J. C. Bach to Smetana who wrote for them.
Based on careful study of primary sources - musical compositions, patents, memoirs and diaries, and unfettered access to historical instruments themselves--Rice's expert presentation is nothing short of exhaustive. From the Clarinet d'Amour to the Contrabass will engage all who love the clarinet and its music.

A vivid picture of the public and private life of a professional musician in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. This well-documented life of Samuel Wesley gives a vivid picture of the life of a professional musician in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century London. Wesley was born in 1766, the son of the Methodist hymn-writer CharlesWesley and nephew of the preacher John Wesley. He was the finest composer and organist of his generation, but his unconventional behaviour makes him of more than ordinary interest. He lived through a crucial stage of English musicfrom the immediately post-Handel generation to the early Romantic period, and his large output includes piano and organ music, orchestral music, church music, glees, and songs. He also taught and lectured on music, and was involved in journalism, publishing, and promoting the music of J. S. Bach. This book draws on letters, family papers, and other contemporary documents to offer a full study of Wesley, his music, and his life and times. PHILIP OLLESON is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Nottingham. He has edited The Letters of Samuel Wesley: Professional and Social Correspondence, 1797-1837, is the joint author (with Michael Kassler) of Samuel Wesley (1766-1837): A Source Book, and has written extensively about other aspects of music in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Between early 1806 and early 1807, Ludwig van Beethoven completed a remarkable series of instrumental works. But critics have struggled to reconcile the music of this banner year with Beethoven's "heroic style," the paradigm through which his middle-period works have typically been understood. Drawing on theories of mediation and a wealth of primary sources, Beethoven 1806 explores the specific contexts in which the music of this year was conceived, composed, and heard. As author Mark Ferraguto argues, understanding this music depends on appreciating the relationships that it both creates and reflects. Not only did Beethoven depend on patrons, performers, publishers, critics, and audiences to earn a living, but he also tailored his compositions to suit particular sensibilities, proclivities, and technologies.

The connections between a great artist's life and work are subtle, complex, and often highly revealing. In the case of Beethoven, however, the standard approach has been to treat his life and his art separately. Now, Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative.
Cooper employs a strictly chronological approach that enables each work to be seen against the musical and biographical background from which it emerged. The result is a much closer confluence of life and work than is usually achieved, for two reasons. First, composition was Beethoven's central preoccupation for most of his life: "I live entirely in my music," he once wrote. Second, recent study of his many musical sketches has enabled a much clearer picture of his everyday compositional activity than was previously possible, leading to rich new insights into the interaction between his life and music. This volume concentrates on Beethoven's artistic achievements both by examining the origins of his works and by expert commentary on some of their most striking and original features. It also reexamines virtually all the evidence--from fictitious anecdotes right down to the translations of individual German words--to avoid recycling old errors. And it offers numerous new details derived from sketch studies and a new edition of Beethoven's correspondence.
Offering a wealth of fresh conclusions and intertwining life and work in illuminating ways, Beethoven will establish itself as the reference on one of the world's greatest composers.

In this valuable collection of essays, published to coincide with the tercentenary of Handel's birth, Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition, focusing on the Italian school, to which they are so crucially indebted. Handel's immediate heritage included the figures of Scarlatti, Gasparini and Vivaldi; this book establishes that context, concentrating on contemporary operatic practice, and proceeds to analyse three of Handel's best-known works. It shows how they elaborate and develop the style and method of the Italian operatic theatre, embracing previous traditions and synthesizing them with a new and exciting accentuation.