This is a study of the musical activities of Empress Marie Therese, one of the most important patrons in the Vienna of Haydn and Beethoven. Building on extensive archival research, including many documents published here for the first time, John A. Rice describes Marie Therese's activities as commissioner, collector and performer of music, and explores the rich and diverse musical culture that she fostered at court. This book, which will be of interest to musicologists, historians of artistic patronage and taste, and practitioners of women's studies, elucidates this remarkable woman's relations with a host of professional musicians, including Haydn, and argues that she played a significant and hitherto unsuspected role in the inception of one of the era's greatest masterpieces, Beethoven's Fidelio. Other composers discussed include Domenico Cimarosa, Joseph Eybler, Michael Haydn, Johann Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paer, Antonio Salieri, Joseph Weigl and Paul Wranitzky.

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.
One of the best known and most admired figures in European music was Wolfgang Amade Mozart. His short but colorful life is of enduring interest, and his works remain central to the repertories of classical music. This book gives a concise and scholarly account of Mozart's activities as a composer of operas. It includes a concise biography, orientated towards the operas; an essay on Mozart's operatic contribution and style, and the antecedents to his operas; a separate synopsis and historical account of each opera; and three essays which bind into narrative form the dictionary entries on librettists, interpreters, and venues. There is a new introduction, a glossary of relevant terms, a list of operatic roles, and a guide to listening.

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.

This second volume of essays in Chopin Studies contains Chopin research by twelve leading scholars. Three main topics are addressed: reception history, aesthetics and criticism, and performance studies. The first four chapters investigate certain images associated with Chopin during his lifetime and after his death: Chopin as classical composer, as salon composer, as modernist, as 'otherwordly', as androgyne. The next four essays contextualize and define aspects of his musical language, including narrative stuctures, baroque affinities, progressive tendencies and functional ambiguity. The last four deal with analysis and source study as related to performance, structure and expression, tempo rubato and 'authentic' interpretation. The book ends with a thumbnail sketch of Chopin as revealed in a recently discovered diary for 1847-8.

Since the bicentennial of Mozart's death in 1991, the principal concern of much Mozart research has been to situate the composer and his music in increasingly well informed biographical, historical, critical and analytical contexts. The contributors to Mozart Studies share this desire to paint ever-more rounded, focused and sensitive pictures of the composer by drawing upon wide-ranging historical materials and critical tools, and to project scholarly understandings considerably beyond the narrow frames of reference that traditionally characterised Mozart research. While chapters are grouped according to the principal areas and topics covered, it is intended that other thematic links between chapters will also emerge, drawing scholars' attention to areas primed for future investigation. In the best traditions of Mozart research, it is hoped that these essays will collectively affirm the vitality of Mozart scholarship and the significant role that this scholarship continues to play in defining and re-defining musicological priorities.

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.

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.

A crucial category across all the arts in the late eighteenth century, the picturesque has lost its currency in modern musical criticism, in spite of its rich potential to shed new light on the fantastical elements of instrumental music in general and the genre of the free fantasia in particular. Just as English garden architecture, in which the picturesque found its origins, was changing the landscape of continental Europe, the fantastical elements of irregularity, temporal displacement, ambiguity, interruption, and self-referentiality in the music of Bach, Haydn and Beethoven were both lauded and criticized in terms borrowed from the discourse of the picturesque. This study reaffirms the centrality of the free fantasia and fantastical gesture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the visual, the literary and the musical.

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.

This volume contains nine substantial essays by the world's leading Berlioz scholars. They cover various aspects of Berlioz's life and works and represent an important contribution to Berlioz research. The book includes essays based on documents, both biographical and musical, that give us, among other things, a portrait of the artist as a young man and a revealing view of an important but little-studied work of his maturity. There are readings of Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust that wrestle anew with the problems of the relationships between literature and music and - as Berlioz's music nearly always requires - with the problems of genre. Two views of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'ete are presented which ask when and why the work was conceived, and how the work coheres. The practical question of Berlioz's metronome marks are here thoroughly studied for the first time. The volume closes with a novel piece, in dialogue form, by the elder statesman of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzun, who treats with exceptional grace the profound issues raised by Berlioz the man and musician.

Traditional musicology has tended to see the Spanish eighteenth century as a period of decline, but this 1998 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 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.

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.

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 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.

This is the first book-length study of the composition, reception, extramusical implications, and stylistic eclecticism of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, a staple of the nineteenth-century musical canon. Cooper devotes extensive attention to the differences between the posthumously published familiar version of the work and the composer's revision, which remained unpublished until 2001. He presents substantial new insights into a work which many listeners and scholars have known only in the version the composer considered less successful.

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach

In "Reinventing Bach," his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.

As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier--restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with "Fantasia," made Bach the sound of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations" opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist.

"Reinventing Bach" is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion--and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology.

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.

This survey distils a wide range of documentary and musical evidence relating to a particularly rich period in the city of Oxford's history. Aspects discussed include concert life, the choral tradition, the gradual establishment of an honours school of music, visiting musicians such as Handel and Haydn, Liszt and Joachim, and the role of figures such as William Crotch, Frederick Ouseley and Hubert Parry in raising the status of music and the musical profession.

This book brings together music and visual arts, especially the art of landscape gardening, in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and German culture. The aesthetic of the picturesque, derived from the controlled wilderness of the landscape garden, provided writers on music with a language in which to describe the musical genre of the free fantasia, and the picturesque emerges here as a vital means for understanding the fantastical elements in the music of C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven.

Recent developments in research have added much to our understanding of Mendelssohn. Of crucial importance to scholars has been the re-emergence in Krakow of the large number of Mendelssohn manuscripts with had been thought lost after the removal from Berlin during World War II. Virtually all Mendelssohn's manuscripts are once again available for study, following the discovery of material previously thought lost during World War II. Peter Ward Jones took account of this in amending the text and appendices for this (1990) edition.

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"

Despite its rather forbidding name, the `Chromatic Fourth' is one of the most familiar short themes in virtually all western music over the four hundred years before the middle of our century. It is a sequence of six notes that can be heard in a huge variety of ways, most originally, effectively, and beautifully in the work of the greatest composers, from the madrigalists to Stravinsky, from Byrd to Bartok, with telling examples in the operas of Monteverdi, Mozart, and Wagner, or in the keyboard music of Bull, Bach, and Schubert. Although the existence of the chromatic fourth has long been recognized, and occasionally mentioned by music historians, this is the first thorough-going attempt to trace its likely origins and its evolution over four hundred years. With over 200 music examples, Peter Williams demonstrates the theme's wonderful variety, and shows that it was used by composers not only as a means of emotional expression, but also as a structural device.

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.

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.