Each entry in this New Grove series of composers and their operas is based on articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, that feature information on the lives of individual composers, their works, their librettists and interpreters, and the places where they performed. These unique books compile the meticulously researched articles into organized narratives, designed to make finding information as easy as possible without sacrificing readability. Each volume is completely up-to-date, and includes a suggested listening guide and an eight-page glossy insert containing relevant illustrations. Each volume is a must-own for lovers of opera and classical music.
Giuseppe Verdi is the most famous Italian composer of opera. While he was sometimes criticized for writing music considered too "simple," his works have endured, and are still performed throughout the world today. This concise volume is a handy guide to the Verdi's life and operas, revising the original New Grove articles and adding a new introduction, a new section on modern Verdi productions, and an updated bibliography.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the pace of London's concert life quickened dramatically, reflecting both the prosperity and the commercial vitality of the capital. The most significant development was the establishment of the public concert within the social and cultural life of fashionable society. The subscription concerts that premiered symphonies by J. C. Bach and Haydn were conspicuous symbols of luxury, even though they were promoted on broadly commercial lines. Drawing on hitherto untapped archival sources and a comprehensive study of daily newspapers, this book analyses audiences at venues as diverse as the Hanover Square Rooms, Vauxhall Gardens and City taverns. The musical taste of the London public is investigated in the light of contemporary theories of aesthetics, and there is detailed discussion of the financial and practical aspects of concert management and performance, in a period that encouraged enterprise and innovation.

The study of the social context of music must consider the day-to-day experiences of its practitioners; their economic, social, professional and artistic goals; and the material and cultural conditions under which these goals were pursued. This book traces the daily working life and aspirations of British musicians during the sweeping social and economic transformation of Britain from 1750 to 1850. It features working musicians of all types and at all levels - organists, singers, instrumentalists, teachers, composers and entrepreneurs - and explores their educational background, their conditions of employment, their wages, the systems of patronage that supported them, and their individual perceptions. Deborah Rohr focuses not only on social and economic pressures but also on a range of negative cultural beliefs faced by the musicians. Also considered are the implications of such conditions for their social and professional status, and for their musical aspirations.

Music aesthetics in late eighteenth-century Germany has always been problematic because there was no aesthetic theory to evaluate the enormous amount of high-quality instrumental music produced by composers like Haydn and Mozart. This book derives a practical aesthetic for German instrumental music during the late eighteenth century from a previously neglected source, reviews of printed instrumental works. At a time when the theory of mimesis dominated aesthetic thought, leaving sonatas and symphonies at the very bottom of the aesthetic hierarchy, a group of reviewers were quietly setting about the task of evaluating instrumental music on its own terms. The reviews document an intersection with trends in literature and philosophy, and reveal interest in criteria like genius, the expressive power of music, and the necessity of unity, several decades earlier than has previously been supposed.

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.

Perspectives on Mozart Performance, published during the Mozart bicentennial year, is the first volume in a new series. It includes essays by distinguished musicologists and performers, each exploring a different aspect of Mozart's music in performance. Several studies consider the eighteenth-century roots of Mozart's approach to performance and examine such issues as the role of ornamentation (Paul Badura-Skoda, Frederick Neumann), improvization (Katalin Komlos), cadenzas (Christoph Wolff), and Mozart's conception of tempos in a pre-metronomic age (Jean-Pierre Marty). Two studies examine Mozart's string writing (Jaap Schroeder) and the influence of his father's remarkably popular Violinschule (Robin Stowell). An essay by Peter Williams treats Mozart's use of the chromatic fourth and performance styles associated with that figura. Finally, the later, nineteenth-century response to Mozart is explored through the study of Mendelssohn's performances of Mozart (R. Larry Todd).

This Companion provides an accessible and up-to-date introduction to the musical work and cultural world of Joseph Haydn. Readers will gain an understanding of the changing social, cultural, and political spheres in which Haydn studied, worked, and nurtured his creative talent. Distinguished contributors provide chapters on Haydn and his contemporaries, his working environments in Eisenstadt and Eszterhaza, his aesthetics, and address humour and exoticism in Haydn's oeuvre. Chapters on the reception of his music explore keyboard performance practices, Haydn's posthumous reputation, and recorded performances and images of his symphonies. The book also surveys the major genres in which Haydn wrote, including symphonies, string quartets, keyboard sonatas and trios, sacred music, miscellaneous vocal genres, and operas composed for Eszterhaza and London.

This volume offers a new view of Joseph Haydn's instrumental music. It argues that many of Haydn's greatest and most characteristic instrumental works are 'through-composed' in the sense that their several movements are bound together into a cycle. This cyclic integration is articulated, among other ways, by the 'progressive' form of individual movements, structural and gestural links between the movements, and extramusical associations. Central to the study is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the 'Farewell' Symphony, No. 45 in F sharp minor (1772). The analysis is distinguished by its systematic use of different methods (Toveyan formalism, Schenkerian voice leading, Schoenbergian developing variation) to elucidate the work's overall coherence. The work's unique musical processes, in turn, suggest an interpretation of the entire piece (not merely the famous 'farewell' finale) in terms of the familiar programmatic story of the musicians' wish to leave Castle Eszterhaza. In a book which relates systematically the results of analysis and interpretation, Professor Webster challenges the concept of 'classical style' which, he argues has distorted our understanding of Haydn's development, and he stresses the need for a greater appreciation of Haydn's early music and of his stature as Beethoven's equal.

This is the first book to address the full range of performance issues for the cello from the Baroque to the early Romantic period. The development of playing techniques and stylistic transitions are traced regionally through a comparison of Italian, French, German, English, and East European performance traits. Through a close study of contemporary violoncello methods, music, early instruments, periodicals, diaries, letters and pictures, Walden provides a cohesive overview which examines construction methods for instruments and bows, fingering and bowing techniques, special effects and ornamentation, accompanying skills and the stylistic preferences of the most famous soloists. Richly illustrated with over 300 music examples, plates and figures, this book provides playing instructions which can easily be applied by modern players to their own performance of period music.

What are musical works? Are they discovered or created? Of what elements are they comprised? How are they specified by notations? What makes a performance of one piece and not another? Is it possible to perform old music authentically? Can ethnic music influenced by foreign sources and presented to tourists genuinely reflect the culture's musical and wider values? Can recordings substitute faithfully for live performances? These are the questions considered in Musical Works and Performances. Part One outlines the nature of musical works, their relation to performances, and their notational specification. Works for performance differ from ones that are merely for playback, and pieces for live rendition are unlike those for studio performance. Pieces vary in the number and kind of their constitutive properties. The identity of musical works goes beyond their sonic profile and depends on their music-historical context. To be of a given work, a performance must match its contents by following instructions traceable to its creation. Some pieces are indicated via exemplars, but many are specified notationally. Scores must be interpreted in light of notational conventions and performance practices they assume. Part Two considers authenticity in performance, musical traditions, and recordings. A performance should follow the composer's instructions. Departures from the ideal are tolerable, but faithfulness is central to the enterprise of work performance, not merely an interpretative option. When musical cultures interact, assimilation from within differs from destruction from without. Even music subject to foreign influences can genuinely reflect the musical traditions and social values of a culture, however. Finally, while most works are for live performance, most performances are experienced via recordings, which have their own, distinctive characteristics. This comprehensive and original analysis of musical ontology discusses many kinds of music, and applies its conclusions to issues as diverse as the authentic performance movement, the cultural integrity of ethnic music, and the implications of the dominance of recorded over live music.

The Jazz Itineraries series, a new format based on Ken Vail's successful Jazz Diaries, charts the careers of famous jazz musicians, listing club and concert appearances with details of recording sessions and movie appearances. Copiously illustrated with contemporary photographs, newspaper extracts, record and performance reviews, ads and posters, the series provides a fascinating insight into the lives of the greatest jazz musicians of our times. No.1 in the series, Dizzy Gillespie: The Bebop Years 1937d1952, chronicles Dizzy_s life from his early struggles, through the birth of bebop, the demise of his first big band, up to his departure for France in 1952.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In "Mozart's Grace," Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace.

Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

Characteristic symphonies have texts associating them with literature, politics, religion, and other aspects of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European culture. Examining both the music and its aesthetic and social contexts, this first full-length study of the genre demonstrates how symphonies constructed individual and collective identities through their subjects, representing emotion, human bodily movement, and the passage of time. Examples discussed include the Pastoral and Eroica symphonies of Beethoven and works by Haydn, Dittersdorf, and other composers of the era. An Appendix provides a thematic index of the entire repertory.

The study of the social context of music must consider the day-to-day experiences of its practitioners. This book traces the daily working life and aspirations of British musicians during the sweeping social and economic transformation of Britain from 1750 to 1850. It features working musicians of all types and at all levels--organists, singers, instrumentalists, teachers, composers, and entrepreneurs--and explores their educational background, their conditions of employment, their wages, the systems of patronage that supported them, and their individual perceptions.

Traditional musicology has tended to see the Spanish 18th century as a period of decline, but this volume shows it to be rich in interest and achievement. Covering stage genres, orchestral and instrumental music, and vocal music (both sacred and secular), it brings together the results of much recent research on such topics as opera, musical instruments, the secular cantata and the villancico, and challenges received ideas about how Italian and Austrian music of the period influenced (or was opposed by) Spanish composers and theorists. Two final chapters outline the presence of Spanish musical sources in the New World.

Schroeder here sets out to challenge the widely held view of Haydn as an inspired instrumental musician who composed in isolation from 18th-century enlightened thinking. By means of both documentary and musical investigation the author seeks instead to present him as a culturally and politically sensitive representative of the Age of Enlightenment.

In this first full-scale study of performance practice in Haydn's keyboard music, Bernard Harrison confronts the important issues facing any performer of Haydn's keyboard music, and at the same time develops some of the recurring controversial questions in broader research on Haydn's oeuvre. 'a major contribution to Haydn scholarship. Potential performers of the composer's keyboard music will find a commanding and well-documented exposition of the problems facing him or her; at the same time the volume will be of fundamental value to those interested in Haydn's music who are not primarily practitioners ... comprehensive and authoritative.' David Wyn Jones

The enduring classic Oratorio for SATB chorus and STB soli. This vocal score, edited and arranged by Michael Pilkington, contains a piano/organ accompaniment and English/German text.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the pace of London's concert life quickened dramatically, reflecting both the prosperity and the commercial vitality of the capital. The most significant development was the establishment of the public concert within the social and cultural life of fashionable society. The subscription concerts that premiered symphonies by J. C. Bach and Haydn were conspicuous symbols of luxury, even though they were promoted on broadly commercial lines. Drawing on hitherto untapped archival sources and a comprehensive study of daily newspapers, this book analyses audiences at venues as diverse as the Hanover Square Rooms, Vauxhall Gardens and City taverns. The musical taste of the London public is investigated in the light of contemporary theories of aesthetics, and there is detailed discussion of the financial and practical aspects of concert management and performance, in a period that encouraged enterprise and innovation.

Following on from his reflections on conducting the nine Beethoven symphonies, Del Mar now gives his views on the remainder of Beethoven's orchestral output. He offers analyses of the music's structure, pointing out key events in the score, and gives advice on how to achieve the desired effect. Drawing on a lifetime's experience of conducting, these reflections are an essential starting-point for young conducters.

This is an essential guide for students of the nine Beethoven symphonies and a starting-point for young conductors. Drawing on his lifelong experience of conducting these works, Del Mar offers an analysis of the music's structure, pointing out key events in the score and offering advice on how to achieve the desired effect. He also compares variant readings in the different editions and further traces the development of Beethoven's style and that of the symphony over the 24 years of their composition.

The description for this book, Thayer's Life of Beethoven, Part I, will be forthcoming.

Who "speaks" to us in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice, " in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that "sings" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that "de-center" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.