The first detailed contextual study of chamber music in Beethoven's Vienna, at a time when the string quartet reigned supreme among the different chamber genres This book is the first detailed contextual study of string quartets in Beethoven's Vienna, at a time when that genre reigned supreme among the different chamber genres. Focusing on a key transition period in the early nineteenth century, which bore witness to fundamental shifts in the 'private' sphere of music-making, it explores the 'cultivation' of string quartets by composers, critics, listeners, performers, publishers and patrons. The book highlights these parties' interactions, ideas and ideals, which were central to defining the unique cultures of chamber music arising at this time. We gain fresh insights into publishing and marketing, performance venues and practices, review culture, listening theories and practices, and composition in early nineteenth-century Vienna. Until now, the unique theatricality of chamber music, and the 'social' nature of its discourse, has been poorly appreciated. Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna addresses this misconception and enriches our understanding of this crucial period of change, in which concert life began and previously 'private' music was moved out onto the stage. NANCY NOVEMBER is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Auckland.

Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists' improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. Pianists will find food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. Audiences will encounter a vivid account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly during them. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.

Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.

Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 presents new perspectives on the role music played in the physical, cultural, and civic spaces of Italian cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Across thirteen chapters, contributors explore the complex connections between sound and space within these urban contexts, demonstrating how music and sound were intimately connected to changing social and political practices. The volume offers a critical redefinition of the core concept of soundscape, considering musical practices through the lenses of territory, space, representation, and identity, in five parts: Soundscape, Phonosphere, and Urban History Urban Soundscapes across Time Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities Urban Soundscapes in Literary Sources Reconstructing Urban Soundscapes in the Digital Era Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 reframes our understanding of Italian music history beyond models of patronage, investigating how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities.

In this first comprehensive examination of the music of the most prolific Bach son, David Schulenberg offers new perspectives on the career, style, and originality of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Of Bach's four sons who became composers, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88) was the most prolific, the most original, and the most influential both during and after his lifetime. This is the first comprehensive study of his music, examining not only the famous keyboard sonatas and concertos but also the songs, the chamber music, and the sacred works, many of which resurfaced only recently and have not previously been evaluated. A compositional biography,the book surveys C. P. E. Bach's extensive output of nearly a thousand works while tracing his musical development-from his student days at Leipzig and Frankfurt (Oder), through his nearly three decades as court musician to Prussian King Frederick "the Great," to his final twenty years as cantor and music director at Hamburg. David Schulenberg, author of important books on the music of J. S. Bach and his first son, W. F. Bach, here considers the legacy of the second son from a compelling new perspective. Focusing on C. P. E. Bach's compositional choices within his social and historical context, Schulenberg shows how C. P. E. Bach deliberately avoided his father's style whileborrowing from the manner of his Berlin colleagues, who were themselves inspired by Italian opera. Schulenberg also shows how C. P. E. Bach, now best known for his virtuoso keyboard works, responded to changing cultural and aesthetic trends by refashioning himself as a writer of vocal music and popular chamber compositions. Audio versions of the book's musical examples, as well as further examples and supplementary tables and texts, are available on a companion website. David Schulenberg is professor of music at Wagner College and teaches historical performance at the Juilliard School. He is the author of The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (University of Rochester Press, 2010).

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.

Sergei Rachmaninoff experienced life-changing upheavals and competing inflection points of musical taste, traversing countries and continents as he pursued the triply-brilliant career of composer-conductor-virtuoso pianist. Born in tsarist Russia and raised as a nobleman in a well-educated musical family, Rachmaninoff led a bold lifestyle as a cutting-edge composer, admirer of the latest trends in art, and even aficionado of new developments in farm equipment for his beloved estate of Ivanovka. Wherever his concertizing took him, to glittering capitals all over the world, Rachmaninoff became a nexus for prominent musicians, writers, actors, and other personalities defining this era. Valeria Z. Nollan's biography of perhaps the finest pianist of the twentieth century plunges readers into Rachmaninoff's complex inner world. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul is the first biography of Rachmaninoff in English that presents him in the fullness of his Russian identity. As someone whose own life in Russian emigration ran in parallel ways to Rachmaninoff's own-and whose meetings with the composer's grandson in Switzerland informed her work-Nollan brings important cultural insights into her observations of the activities of this generation of creative artists. She also traces the intricacies of Rachmaninoff's relations with the women closest to him-whose imprints are palpable in his compositions-and introduces a mystery woman whose existence challenges our established narrative of his life.

This edition presents 65 diverse songs by major composers of German art song, or lieder, and is the perfect one-volume lieder source for voice students. All the songs are new Vocal Library editions. Historical notes about the relevant history and background of each song are included, as are line-by-line translations for study. A select committee of experienced voice teachers was consulted to choose the most essential and vocally instructive songs in compiling this collection. Composers represented: Beethoven, Brahms, Franz, Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler, Fanny Hensel, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Strauss, Wolf. Co-editor Dr. Virginia Saya, on the faculty of Loyola Marymount University, is a musicologist with a special interest in lieder. This collection includes the first American edition of Funf Ophelia Lieder by Brahms. 288 pages, sewn binding.

DISCOVER THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WORLD'S MOST-LOVED COMPOSER; Musical history is full of tormented geniuses, tortured despite - or because of - their enormous talent. Yet perhaps the greatest musical virtuoso the world has ever known cannot be counted among them. Though he faced great hardships, Mozart was surely the happiest composer who ever lived.; In Mozart: The Man Revealed, John Suchet breathes new life into the story of the 'boy genius', revealing a complex character, yet one who always remained comfortable with himself and at ease with his gift. His musical legacy may be immortal, but the man behind the music was gloriously human.

Examines the life and compositional oeuvre of prolific eighteenth century musician, composer, and singer Marianna Martines (1744-1813). Marianna Martines (1744-1813) was one of the most accomplished, prolific, and highly honored female musicians of the eighteenth century. She spent most of her life in a remarkable household that included celebrated librettist Pietro Metastasio, who supervised her education and remained a powerful and supportive mentor. She studied with the young Joseph Haydn, and Vienna knew her as a gifted, aristocratic singer and keyboard player who performed for the pleasure of the Empress Maria Theresa. The regular private concerts she held in her home attracted the presence and participation of some of Vienna's leading musicians; Mozart enjoyed playing keyboard duets with her. She composed prolifically and in a wide variety of genres, vocal and instrumental, writing church music, oratorios, Italian arias, sonatas, and concertos. Much of that music survives, and those who study it, perform it, and listen to it will be impressed today by its craftsmanship and beauty. This book, the first volume fully devoted to Martines, examines her life and compositional oeuvre. Based largely on eighteenth-century printed sources, archival documents, and letters [including several by Martines herself, most of them published here for the first time] the book presents a detailed picture of the small but fascinating world in which she lived and demonstrates the skillfulness and creativity with which she manipulated the conventions of the gallant style. Focusing on a limited number of representative works, and using many musical examples, it vividly conveys the nature and extent of her compositional achievementand encourages the future performance of her works. The late Irving Godt was Professor of Music at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. John A. Rice, independent scholar, is a member of the Akademie fur Mozart-Forschungin Salzburg.

The Sunday Times bestseller, revised and updated for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. ---- As heard throughout 2020 on Classic FM ---- You know the music... but do you know the man? ---- Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the world's best loved and most influential composers. His life - its dramas, conflicts, loves and losses - is played out in his music. ---- In this special edition to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth - with a new section featuring his most celebrated pieces - John Suchet shows us the man behind the music. He reveals a difficult and complex character, struggling to continue his profession as musician despite increasing deafness, alienating friends with unprovoked outbursts of anger one moment, overwhelming them with excessive kindness and generosity the next, living in a city in almost constant disarray because of war with France. ---- This is the real Beethoven, and Suchet brings him faithfully and vividly to life. ---- This updated edition of Suchet's acclaimed biography contains new material, including a detailed guide to Beethoven's most important compositions, family tree and timeline.

Beethoven's piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people. In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven's youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812-1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s. Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven's sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today's audience, Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humor of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians, or professional pianists. The book includes a link to recordings of Rosen performing extracts from several of the sonatas, illustrating points made in the text.

This is the only English translation of this important book by the world's most distinguished Bach scholar. This work is widely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive treatment of the Bach cantatas. It begins with a historical survey of the seventeenth-century background to the cantatas, and performance practice issues. The core of the book is a work-by-work study in which each cantata in turn is represented by its libretto, a synopsis of its movements, and a detailed analytical commentary. This format makes it extremely useful as a reference work for anyone listening to, performing in, or studying any of the Bach cantatas. In this edition all the cantata librettos are given in German-English parallel text. The most recent (sixth) German edition appeared in 1995. For the English edition the text has been carefully revised to bring it up to date, taking account of Bach scholarship since that date.

Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert was much more technically innovative than has been supposed, and argues that the composer's technical discoveries constitute a rich legacy of specific influences on later composers. Providing rich new insights into the creative practice of one of the major figures of classical music, this two-volume study reframes our understanding of Schubert as an innovator who constantly pushed at the frontiers of style and expression.

This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century.

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.

Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain addresses operatic "experiences" outside the opera houses of Britain during the nineteenth century. The essays adopt a variety of perspectives exploring the processes through which opera and ideas about opera were cultivated and disseminated, by examining opera-related matters in publication and performance, in both musical and non-musical genres, outside the traditional approaches to transmission of operatic works and associated concepts. As a group, they exemplify the broad array of questions to be grappled with in seeking to identify commonalities that might shed light in new and imaginative ways on the experiences and manifestations of opera and notions of opera in Victorian Britain. In unpacking the significance, relevance, uses, and impacts of opera within British society, the collection seeks to enhance understanding of a few of the manifold ways in which the population learned about and experienced opera, how audiences and the broader public understood the genre and the aesthetics surrounding it, how familiarity with opera played out in British culture, and how British customs, values, and principles affected the genre of opera and perceptions of it.

While interpretation of musical scores is amongst the most frequent of musical activities, it is also, strangely, one of the least researched. This collection of essays seeks to remedy this deficit by illuminating ways in which today's curious musician - interested in probing beyond the dictates of a faintly understood score - can engage more deeply and thoughtfully with the act of interpretation. Skilful musical interpretation draws on a vast range of knowledges. The chapters of this collection accordingly address a similarly broad set of issues, including notation, rhetoric, theory, historiography, performers past and present, instrument builders, concert presenters, reception history, and more. Written by leading experts from a variety of musical subdisciplines, these essays are designed to be accessible and practically relevant for musical performance. Many of the chapters utilize case studies and, as such, will be useful for university and conservatory level students as well as music scholars. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Musicological Research.

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyonce, The Carters, Helene Cixous, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monae, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are explored through the lenses of pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries.

This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart's late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book's thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera's advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart's operatic work.

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.

The International Who's Who in Classical Music 2022 is a vast source of biographical and contact information for singers, instrumentalists, composers, conductors, managers and more. Each entrant has been given the opportunity to update his or her information for the new improved 2022 edition. Each biographical entry comprises personal information, principal career details, repertoire, recordings and compositions, and full contact details where available. Appendices provide contact details for national orchestras, opera companies, music festivals, music organizations and major competitions and awards. International Who's Who in Classical Music includes individuals involved in all aspects of the world of classical music: composers, instrumentalists, singers, arrangers, writers, musicologists, conductors, directors and managers. Key Features: - about 8,000 detailed biographical entries - covers the classical and light classical fields - includes both up-and-coming musicians and well-established names. This book will prove valuable for anyone in need of reliable, up-to-date information on the individuals and organizations involved in classical music.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Eine Biographie appeared in Prague a few months after the composer's death, thirteen years before the next biography of Beethoven would appear. Virtually nothing is known about the author, Johann Aloys Schlosser, except that he was born in the small town of Lann, in Bohemia, around 1790 and was a partner in a publishing firm in Prague from 1827-28, at which time he published this first brief biography of Beethoven. Many writers have pointed out the flaws in Schlosser's "biography". The purpose of the present edition is not to provide a clear and vivid picture of Beethoven's life, but to enable English-speaking readers to judge Schlosser's book for themselves rather than relying on secondhand criticisms, and to illuminate what was known and believed in Vienna and Prague in 1827 - not only about Beethoven but about his relationship to Haydn and Mozart, and to the music of Bach and Handel. Copious annotations and an introductory essay by the eminent Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper put Schlosser's text into perspective and clarify inaccuracies in the original text. Available for the first time in English, Schlosser's first biography of Beethoven substantially enriches our understanding of the attitudes of Beethoven's contemporaries and fills an important gap in Beethoven scholarship.