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

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

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

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

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

Examines the history of musical self-quotation, and reveals and explores a previously unidentified case of Schubert quoting one of his own songs in a major instrumental work. Enthusiasts and experts have long relished Schubert's quotations of his own music. This study centers on a previously unidentified pairing: "Ave Maria," one of his most beloved songs, and the Piano Trio no. 2, a masterpiece that holds a unique position in his career. Messing's Self-Quotation in Schubert interrogates the concept of self-quotation from the standpoints of terminology and authorial intent, and it demonstrates, for the first time, how Schubert's practice of self-quotation relates to prevailing practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Messing goes on to analyze in detail the musical relationships between the two works and to investigate thecircumstances that led Schubert to compose each of them. "Ave Maria" is one of the few Schubert songs for which we have documentation of some early private performances, and the trio stood at the heart of Schubert's only public concert devoted to his works. Messing establishes that Schubert sought to convey an associative meaning with this self-quotation, trusting in his contemporaries' familiarity with the original melody and with Walter Scott's poem, a text that carried profound resonances in Catholic Vienna. Scrutinizing this evidence yields the symbolic purpose behind Schubert's allusion to "Ave Maria" in the piano trio: honoring the recently deceased Beethoven andvalidating Schubert as his legatee. SCOTT MESSING is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music Emeritus at Alma College.

This was the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689-1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eighteenth century to seek work beyond the Alps in locations such as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna. First published in 1999, the book investigates the careers of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists. However, it also considers key themes such as social and friendship networks, itinerancy, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, the evolution of taste, the role of gender in the reception of art, the diversity of modes and genres, and the reception of Italian artists and performers outside Italy.

Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured.
The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.

This is a translation of the second (1858) edition of Berlioz's landmark treatise by Mary Cowden Clarke, daughter of music publisher Vincent Novello. The book was quick to establish itself as a standard work, reflecting Berlioz's keen understanding of the orchestra as both composer and conductor. It is intended as a textbook on the craft of orchestration and to promote better understanding of the essential character of each instrument. Technical details and sonorities are discussed and illustrated with musical examples from composers Berlioz admired, including Gluck and Beethoven, and from his own compositions. This edition includes a section on new instruments, such as the saxophone and concertina, and on the orchestra, and a discussion on the art of conducting. Today the treatise is an important source of information on musical practices of the time and provides us with valuable insight into Berlioz's imaginative and original thinking as a musician.

Hector Berlioz (1803 60189) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation, whose music in many ways was ahead of its time. He was also a highly respected journalist and critic, producing monthly articles for the Journal des D bats for over thirty years, as well as other writings including his posthumously published autobiographical M moires. Unlike journalism, which he disliked, letter-writing was a task which he relished and at which he excelled, producing sometimes four or five in a day and more than 3,500 during his lifetime. The letters reflect the man - exuberant, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give us a fascinating, first-hand, insight into his life. This two-volume selection includes some 300 examples. Volume 1 includes letters to family, fellow musicians such as Hiller, Lizst and Schumann, and friends such as Auguste Morel and fellow critic Joseph D'Ortigue.

Hector Berlioz (1803 1869) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation, whose music in many ways was ahead of its time. He was also a highly respected journalist and critic, producing monthly articles for the Journal des D bats for over thirty years, as well as other writings including his posthumously published autobiographical M moires. Unlike journalism, which he disliked, letter-writing was a task which he relished and at which he excelled, producing sometimes four or five in a day and more than 3,500 during his lifetime. The letters reflect the man - exuberant, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give us a fascinating, first-hand, insight into his life. This two-volume selection includes some 300 examples. Volume 2, with a preface by the composer Charles Gounod, is devoted to Berlioz's letters to his lifelong friend, the lawyer and writer Humbert Ferrand.

Louis Spohr (1784-1859) was one of the most popular musicians of the early Romantic period, but of his considerable output (including 10 symphonies, 15 violin concertos, nine operas and a large amount of chamber music), only the Octet op.32 and the Nonet op.31 are heard regularly today. Spohr established his name as a virtuoso violinist and completed his Violin method in 1831. As a conductor, he contributed to the increasing use of the baton to direct performances. He travelled widely in Europe, visiting London for the first time in 1820, when he directed a Philharmonic Society concert, and returning four times between 1843 and 1853. This autobiography, begun in 1847, gives a lively (but not necessarily always accurate) account of life as a professional musician. Spohr's own account ends at June 1838, and the book was completed by family members using materials provided by his wife.

A fresh, accessible guide to Mozart's life and works

Over a period of roughly twenty years, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed more than 600 finished pieces of music. If you were the director of a major symphony orchestra, you could program only works by Mozart for an entire year--and still you would barely have scratched the surface of the composer's immense, and immensely moving, body of work.

"The Mostly Mozart Guide to Mozart" is an accessible, insightful, and entertaining resource for music lovers looking for a deeper understanding of the genius of Mozart. It combines a brief and revealing account of his life and times with a comprehensive survey of his major compositions. You'll also discover accounts of major performances, fascinating anecdotes about Mozart and his works, comments from artists past and present, and tips on what to listen for when you listen to Mozart. And, a selected discography will help you develop a fantastic collection of recordings by the finest modern musicians playing Mozart's greatest music.

Filled with insightful quotes from fellow composers, critics, and Mozart admirers, as well as informative illustrations, "The Mostly Mozart Guide to Mozart" answers all of your questions about this transcendent genius and his music, and probably some you never thought to ask.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

C. P. E. Bach Studies collects together nine wide-ranging essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century music. Offering fresh perspectives on one of the towering figures of the period, the authors explore Bach's music in its cultural contexts, and show in diverse and complementary ways the reciprocal relationship between Bach's work and contemporary literary, theological, and aesthetic debates. Topics include Bach's relation to theories of sensibility and the sublime; the free fantasy and concepts of self and being; and Bach's engagement with music history and the legacy of his predecessors. Wider questions of C. P. E. Bach reception also play an important part in the book, which explores not only the interpretation of Bach's music in his time, but also its reception over the two centuries since his death.

The eighteenth century arguably boasts a more remarkable group of significant musical figures, and a more engaging combination of genres, styles and aesthetic orientations, than any century before or since, yet huge swathes of its musical activity remain under-appreciated. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music provides a comprehensive survey, examining little-known repertories, works and musical trends alongside more familiar ones. Rather than relying on temporal, periodic and composer-related phenomena to structure the volume, it is organised by genre; chapters are grouped according to the traditional distinctions of music for the church, music for the theatre and music for the concert room that conditioned so much thinking, activity and output in the eighteenth century. A valuable summation of current research in this area, the volume also encourages readers to think of eighteenth-century music less in terms of overtly teleological developments than of interacting and mutually stimulating musical cultures and practices.

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.

This is the third volume in the series Beethoven Studies. The aim of this series is to present scholarly work on Beethoven, broad in range as well as meticulous in method. The contributors have in common a special interest in the sources for Beethoven's life and for this creative activity, including original scores, sketchbooks, conversation books, correspondence, and other documentary material. Beethoven Studies 3 includes biographical, critical and analytical contributions, with a special emphasis on Beethoven's working processes. Although some of the essays are for the specialist, others, in particular the biographical ones, require little more than some knowledge and enjoyment of Beethoven's music, or an interest in the man himself. The book includes many music examples, and reproductions of autographs and watermarks, and it is very fully indexed.

Most scholars since World War Two have assumed that composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) maintained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime. As these commentators have rightly noted, Mendelssohn was born Jewish and did not convert to Protestantism until age seven, his grandfather was the famous Jewish reformer and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his music was banned by the Nazis, who clearly viewed him as a Jew.
Such facts tell only part of the story, however. Through a mix of cultural analysis, biographical study, and a close examination of the libretto drafts of Mendelssohn's sacred works, The Price of Assimilation provides dramatic new answers to the so-called "Mendelssohn Jewish question."
Sposato demonstrates how Mendelssohn's father, Abraham, worked to distance the family from its Jewish past, and how Mendelssohn's reputation as a composer of Christian sacred music was threatened by the reverence with which German Jews viewed his family name. In order to prove the sincerity of his Christian faith to both his father and his audiences, Mendelssohn aligned his early sacred works with a nineteenth-century anti-Semitic musical tradition, and did so more fervently than even his Christian collaborators required. With the death of Mendelssohn's father and the near simultaneous establishment of the composer's career in Leipzig in 1835, however, Mendelssohn's fear of his background began to dissipate, and he began to explore ways in which he could prove the sincerity of his faith without having to publicly disparage his Jewish heritage.

This study of a hitherto neglected aspect of Liszt and his music aims to restore a balanced view of both man and artist. In contrast to the familiar portrayal of the virtuoso pianist, Liszt is considered here as a serious man of ideas: in tracing the composer's relationships and attitudes to the twin themes of revolution and religion, Paul Merrick finds much of Liszt's music, both secular and sacred, to be inspired by the same deeply felt religious conviction that also governed his private life from an early age. The first part of the book is primarily biographical and considers Liszt's reactions to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, his relationship with the Abbe Lamennais, the Comtesse d' Agoult, Princess Wittgenstein and Wagner, and contains the first convincing explanation for the sudden cancellation of Liszt's marriage to Princess Wittgenstein. The remaining sections consider the church music and the programmatic music that is related to this.

Drawing upon a remarkable mix of intensive research and the personal experience of a career devoted to the music about which Dvoak so presciently spoke, Maurice Peress's lively and convincing narrative treats readers to a rare and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of the burgeoning American school of music and beyond.
In Dvorak to Duke Ellington, Peress begins by recounting the music's formative years: Dvorak's three year residency as Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York (1892-1895), and his students, in particular Will Marion Cook and Rubin Goldmark, who would in turn become the teachers of Ellington, Gershwin, and Copland. We follow Dvorak to the famed Chicago World's Fair of 1893, where he directed a concert of his music for Bohemian Honor Day. Peress brings to light the little known African American presence at the Fair: the piano professors, about-to-be-ragtimers; and the gifted young artists Paul Dunbar, Harry T. Burleigh, and Cook, who gathered at the Haitian Pavilion with its director, Frederick Douglass, to organize their own gala concert for Colored Persons Day.
Peress, a distinguished conductor, is himself a part of this story; working with Duke Ellington on the Suite from Black, Brown and Beige and his "opera comique," Queenie Pie; conducting the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass; and reconstructing landmark American concerts at which George Antheil's Ballet Mecanique, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, James Reese Europe's Clef Club (the first all-black concert at Carnegie Hall), and Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige, were first presented. Concluding with an astounding look at Ellington and his music, Dvorak to Duke Ellingtonoffers an engrossing, elegant portrait of the Dvorak legacy, America's music, and the inestimable African-American influence upon it.

Focusing on music written in the period 1800-1850, Thinking about Harmony traces the responses of observant musicians to the music that was being created in their midst by composers including Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. It tells the story of how a separate branch of musical activity - music analysis - evolved out of the desire to make sense of the music, essential both to its enlightened performance and to its appreciation. The book integrates two distinct areas of musical inquiry - the history of music theory and music analysis - and the various notions that shape harmonic theory are put to the test through practical application, creating a unique and intriguing synthesis. Aided by an extensive compilation of carefully selected and clearly annotated music examples, readers can explore a panoramic projection of the era's analytical responses to harmony, thereby developing a more intimate rapport with the period.

Associated through descriptive texts with literature, politics, religion, and other subjects, 'characteristic' symphonies offer an opportunity to study instrumental music as it engages important social and political debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social contexts by focussing on the musical representation of feeling, human physical movement, and the passage of time. The works discussed include Beethoven's Pastoral and Eroica Symphonies, Haydn's Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf's symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and orchestral battle reenactments of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. A separate chapter details the aesthetic context within which characteristic symphonies were conceived, as well as their subsequent reception, and a series of appendixes summarises bibliographic information for over 225 relevant examples.