This book takes advantage of new and often surprising biographical research on the Loder family as a whole and its four main figures, using them to illustrate aspects of music history in the 19th century. Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder (1809-1865) and his Family illuminates three areas that have recently attracted much interest: the musical profession, music in the British provinces and colonies, and English Romantic opera. The Loder family was pre-eminent in Bath's musical world in the early nineteenth century. John David Loder (1788-1846) led the theatre orchestra there from 1807, and later the Philharmonic orchestra and Ancient Concerts in London; he also wrote the leading instruction manual on violin playing and taught violin at the Royal Academy of Music. His son Edward James (1809-65) was a brilliant but underrated composer of opera, songs, and piano music. George Loder (1816-68) was a well-known flautist and conductor who made a name in New York and eventually settled in Adelaide, where he conducted the Australian premieres of Les Huguenots, Faust, and other important operas. Kate Fanny Loder (1825-1904) became a successful pianist and teacher in early Victorian London, and she is only now getting her due as a composer. This book takes advantage of new and often surprising biographical research on the Loder family as a whole and its four main figures. It uses them to illustrate several aspects of music history: the position of professional musicians in Victorian society; music in the provinces, especiallyBath and Manchester; the Victorian opera libretto; orchestra direction; violin teaching; travelling musicians in the US and Australasia; opera singers and companies; and media responses to English opera. The concluding section isan intense analysis and reassessment of Edward Loder's music, with special emphasis on his greatest work, the opera Raymond and Agnes. NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a leading authority on Victorian music. CONTRIBUTORS: Stephen Banfield, David Chandler, Andrew Clarke, Liz Cooper, Therese Ellsworth, David J. Golby, Andrew Lamb, Valerie Langfield, Alison Mero, Paul Rodmell, Matthew Spring, Julja Szuster, Nicholas Temperley

Brahms once complained that singers never performed his songs in the groups in which he had published them, which he likened to 'song bouquets'. Over a century later, many singers and musicologists continue to ignore Brahms's wishes and focus on the individual songs rather than the bouquet groups. This is the first detailed study of the implications of Brahms's comments. Following an examination of contemporary aesthetic and generic frameworks, the book traces Brahms's Lieder from their conception, to the arrangement into bouquets, to performance and reception, and examines the sometimes contradictory roles played by poet, composer, performer and recipient in creating coherence in song collections. An investigation of the graphic cycles of Max Klinger reveals a startling visual analogue of Brahms's conception of the song bouquet, and a final examination of the evidence of Brahms's aesthetic outlook reveals that his intentions may have been cyclic in more than one sense.

Wolf has been regarded as a composer who followed the style and aesthetics of Wagnerian music drama without question, while writing in a genre often seen as less challenging than the symphony or opera. This 1999 book re-examines the evidence concerning Wolf's responses to Wagner and Wagnerism and suggests ways in which he voiced his criticism through song, and his one completed opera Der Corregidor. This opens up insights into the kind of impact Wagner had on those following in his wake, and into the complexity and subtlety of the late nineteenth-century Lied. From this perspective, Wolf emerges as a persuasive and articulate figure of wide musical and artistic significance.

Hundreds of the letters that Gustav Mahler addressed to his parents and siblings survive, yet they have remained virtually unknown. Now, for the first time Mahler scholar Stephen McClatchie presents over 500 of these letters in a clear, lively translation in The Mahler Family Letters. Drawn primarily from the Mahler-Rose Collection at the University of Western Ontario, the volume presents a complete, well-rounded view of the family's correspondence.
Spanning the mid 1880s through 1910, the letters record the excitement of a young man with a bourgeoning career as a conductor and provide a glimpse into his day-to-day activities rehearsing and conducting operas and concerts in Budapeast and Hamburg, and composing his first symphonies and songs. On the private side, they document his parents' illnesses and deaths and the struggles of his siblings Alois, Justine, Otto, and Emma. The letters also give Mahler's insightful impressions of contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Hans von Bulow, as well as his personal feelings about significant events, such as his first big success--the completion of Carl Maria von Weber's Die drei Pintos in 1889. In the fall of 1894, the character of the letters changes when Justine and Emma come to live with Mahler in Hamburg and then Vienna, removing the need to communicate by letter about quotidian matters. At this point, the letters relay noteworthy events such as Mahler's campaign to be named Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his conducting tours throughout Europe, and his courtship of Alma Schindler.
The Mahler Family Letters provides a vital, nuanced source of information about Mahler's life, his personality, and hisrelationships. McClatchie has generously annotated each letter, contextualizing and clarifying contemporary historical references and Mahler family acquaintances, and created an indispensable resource for all Mahlerists, 19th-century musicologists, and historians of 19th-century Germany and Austria.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colorful account of such operatic favorites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgr lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus.

This Companion presents a new understanding of the relationship between music and culture in and around the nineteenth century, and encourages readers to explore what Romanticism in music might mean today. Challenging the view that musical 'romanticism' is confined to a particular style or period, it reveals instead the multiple intersections between the phenomenon of Romanticism and music. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, and reflecting current scholarly debates across the humanities, it places music at the heart of a nexus of Romantic themes and concerns. Written by a dynamic team of leading younger scholars and established authorities, it gives a state-of-the-art yet accessible overview of current thinking on this popular topic.

The French flute player and conductor Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) was an extraordinary virtuoso and a major figure in fin de siecle Parisian musical life. Based on a treasure trove of private documents of Taffanel's previously unpublished letters and papers, Taffanel: Genius of the Flute recounts the rich story of his multi-faceted career as a player, conductor, composer, teacher, and leader of musical organizations.
As a player, Taffanel had a rare vision of the flute as a serious, expressive instrument and is credited with re-establishing it in the mainstream of music. He was also an inspiring teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, to whom many modern flutists can trace their roots. In 1879, Taffanel founded the Societe de musique de chambre pour instruments a vent (Society of Chamber Music for Wind Instruments), reviving the wind ensemble music of Mozart and Beethoven, and breaking the dominance of piano and strings in recital and chamber music. From 1890, he served as chief conductor at the Paris Opera and the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris Conservatory Orchestra)--the first time a flutist, rather than a string player, had been appointed to such key positions.
Edward Blakeman expertly places these and many other elements of Taffanel's story in the rich political and cultural backdrop of the time, evoking Conservatoire intrigues, the Societe des concerts, and Taffanel's relationships with various musicians and major composers. Blakeman details the circumstances surrounding landmark commissions, performances, and repertoire, and weaves the details from Taffanel's correspondence with first-person interviews and flute lore. What emerges is a portrait of an all-around musician who was also a modest and genial man."

Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) was arguably the greatest violinist of the nineteenth century. But Joachim was also a composer of virtuoso pieces, violin concertos, orchestral overtures and chamber music works. Uhde's book will be thestandard work on the music of Joseph Joachim for many years to come. Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), of Jewish-Hungarian descent, was arguably the greatest violinist of the nineteenth century. His performing career in Berlin transformed the aesthetics and interpretation of German music. But Joachim wasalso a composer of virtuoso pieces, violin concertos, orchestral overtures, and chamber music works, all written between 1847 and 1864 in one intense outpouring of creativity. Katharina Uhde follows Joachim's compositionalpath through a changing cultural milieu. Joachim's compositions display intimate knowledge of the works of Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, and Brahms, yet he was no mere imitator. Joachim's style, classically conceived yetseasoned with a preference for dark, melancholy soundscapes and, in the earlier years, ciphers, virtuosity, and 'psychological' programmaticism, emerges as the product of various personal and socio-cultural currents: his search for national, religious, and cultural identity and a mature compositional style. Joachim's music drew on a wealth of treasures accumulated in his process of 'enculturation', which began with Mendelssohn in Leipzig. Joachim'saesthetic evolved from a deeply subjective approach, not insignificantly inspired by his muse, Gisela von Arnim. Her circle - the von Arnim and Grimm families - became Joachim's cultural and literary haven. But unforeseen events also impacted his output, among them Schumann's death, the ascent of the young Brahms, and the 'War of the Romantics'. Joachim's music throws light onto a vibrant decade, colored by realism, naturalism, new visual technologies, andemerging academic disciplines including psychology. Uhde's book will be the standard work on the music of Joseph Joachim for many years to come. KATHARINA UHDE is Assistant Professor for Violin and Musicology at Valparaiso University, IN.

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"

Covering Berlioz's musical style and influence, and drawing on his literary works and extensive correspondence, this is a compelling study of both man and music, from the time when he was a medical student, discovering Parisian music in 1821, through the peak of French Romanticism in the 1830's to the serene compositions of his later years.

Capturing the man and the musician-the legendary virtuoso tours, the creator of new types of orchestral and choral music, and of piano works and transcriptions which revolutionized the possibilities of the instrument-Derek Watson shows how Liszt the cosmopolitan, a man unique in his breadth of travels and culture, drew on a richly diverse legacy of art, and left his mark of many different schools of composition.

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject.

"Les Contes d'Hoffmann" is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and "opera-comiques." Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself."

This book presents a theory of metrical conflict and applies it to the music of Robert Schumann, thereby placing that composer's distinctive metrical style in focus. Krebs describes various categories of metrical conflict that characterize the music of Schumann, investigates how states of conflict arise and are manipulated and resolved in the course of compositions, and studies the interaction of metrical conflict with form, pitch structure, and text. The theoretical material is fancifully interwoven with commentary by Florestan and Eusebius, fictional characters based on Schumann's names for contrasting aspects of his own personality, who provide numerous illustrations from "their" compositions. Rich in allusions to Schumann's titles, his writings, and his life, Fantasy Pieces will appeal to all who are fond of this composer's music as well as to theorists.

The difficulties of interpreting Berlioz are interestingly explained by a conductor of legendary knowledge and understanding. For the students of conducting this book is nothing short of invaluable, being a guide to technique as well as to the confusions arising from Berlioz's imaginative orchestration.

This book examines two notable forms of chamber music involving piano and strings. Smallman surveys the development of these genres from their origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.

In this book, Warren Darcy traces the compositional genesis of Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, the first opera of his great operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. He also attempts a comprehensive formal and tonal analysis of the piece. Basing his work upon Wagner's textual and musical manuscripts, he employs the most up-to-date analytical techniques.

This book focuses on musical writings in the daily and periodical press in France during the nineteenth century. It covers the criticism of a wide range of Western music, from c. 1580 to 1880, explaining how composers such as Bach and Beethoven secured a permanent place in the repertory. In particular, Dr Ellis considers the music journalism of the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, the single most important specialist periodical of the mid nineteenth century, explaining how French music criticism was influenced by aesthetic and philosophical movements. Dr Ellis analyses the process of canon formation, the development of French musicology and the increasing sensitivity of critics to questions of performance practice. Chapters on new music examine the conflict, inevitable in publishers' journals, between commercial interest and aesthetic integrity.

This investigation offers new perspectives on Giuseppe Verdi's attitudes to women and the functions which they fulfilled for him. The book explores Verdi's professional and personal relationship with women who were exceptional within the traditional socio-sexual structure of patria potesta, in the context of women's changing status in nineteenth-century Italian society. It focusses on two women; the singers Giuseppina Strepponi, who supported and enhanced Verdi's creativity at the beginning of his professional life and Teresa Stolz, who sustained his sense of self-worth at its end. Each was an essential emotional benefactor without whom Verdi's career would not have been the same. The subject of the Strepponi-Verdi marriage and the impact of Strepponi's past deserve further detailed and nuanced discussion. This book demonstrates Verdi's shifting power-balance with Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. The negative stereotypes concerning operatic 'divas' do not withstand scrutiny when applied either to Strepponi or to Stolz. This book presents a revisionist appraisal of Stolz through close examination of her letters. Revealing Stolz's value to Verdi, they also provide contemporary operatic criticism and behind-the-scenes comment, some excerpts of which are published here in English for the first time.

Improvisation was a crucial aspect of musical life in Europe from the late eighteenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth, representing a central moment in both public occasions and the private lives of many artists. Composers dedicated themselves to this practice at length while formulating the musical ideas later found at the core of their published works; improvisation was thus closely linked to composition itself. The full extent of this relation can be inferred from both private documents and reviews of concerts featuring improvisations, while these texts also inform us that composers quite often performed in public as both improvisers and interpreters of pieces written by themselves or others. Improvisations presented in concert were distinguished by a remarkable degree of structural organisation and complexity, demonstrating performers' consolidated abilities in composition as well as their familiarity with the rules for improvising outlined by theoreticians.

This is the first study in modern times dealing exclusively with the flutes used in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras. It details the history of the transverse flute from 1500 until the early nineteenth century. Advice is given on acquiring instruments, and their care and maintenance. Additional chapters guide the reader to sources about relevant technique and style, recommend repertoire, and give general advice to the modern player. The text is enhanced by numerous photographs of important historic flutes.

In 1848, the penultimate year of his life, Chopin visited England and Scotland at the instigation of his aristocratic Scots pupil, Jane Stirling. In the autumn of that year, he returned to Paris. The following autumn he was dead. Despite the fascination the composer continues to hold for scholars, this brief but important period, and his previous visit to London in 1837, remain little known. In this richly illustrated study, Peter Willis draws on extensive original documentary evidence, as well as cultural artefacts, to tell the story of these two visits and to place them into aristocratic and artistic life in mid-nineteenth-century England and Scotland. In addition to filling a significant hole in our knowledge of the composer's life, the book adds to our understanding of a number of important figures, including Jane Stirling and the painter Ary Scheffer. The social and artistic milieux of London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh are brought to vivid life.

Tchaikovsky not only composed, he also wrote about music. This substantial anthology of Russian writing on Russian music features the most influential critics of music in nineteenth-century Russia. They wrote on the first two generations of Russian composers from Glinka to Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The volume reveals through contemporary Russian eyes how the foundations of the hugely popular Russian classical repertory were laid, providing a vivid picture of the musical life of the opera house and the concert hall from which this repertory sprang. Featuring most extensively the critical writing of Odoyevsky, Serov, Cui and Laroche, the volume contains the first authoritative review of key works, such as Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and Rimsky-Korsakov's First Symphony.

Shortly after Chopin's death in 1849, Franz Liszt wrote the first full-length biography of his fellow composer. As one of Chopin's friends, Liszt created a unique biography that allows the reader to experience the world of Chopin through the memories of one of his most adamant supporters. This translation is the starting volume of Janita Hall-Swadley's The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, the very first production of Liszt's entire literary collection in English. In addition to the English translation of Liszt's Gesammelte Schriften, collected and edited by Lina Ramann and published in Germany in 1880/83, each volume contains a Foreword written by a scholar and expert on Liszt and that volume's topic. New research and perspectives in the field of Liszt studies are presented in the introduction to each book in the series, and the translations themselves are enhanced with annotations in accordance with modern standards of musicological research. In Volume 1, Liszt provides insight into Chopin's early childhood and musical development, the cultural traditions and customs that inspired the polonaises and mazurkas, and the final days and hours of the composer before he died. Liszt also offers the reader a psychological view of the composer that had not been seriously undertaken by anyone prior to Liszt. Although Liszt offered what some scholars regard as perhaps an idealized image of the composer, readers will enjoy the personal anecdotes and memories that only one close to the late composer could have known. Liszt even takes on the sensitive topic of the love affair between Chopin and the great French woman writer George Sand, much to the displeasure of the former's family. The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt: Volume 1: F. Chopin includes a thorough discussion of Liszt as an author and the tainted past that surrounded his writings beginning in the 1930s. The much neglected topic of Liszt s relationship with his publishers is explored, and the critical questionnaires that Liszt had sent to Chopin s sister in preparation for writing the biography are included. Finally, a discussion of the professional and personal relationship between Chopin and Liszt is provided, making this volume a valuable addition to the study of both composers."

Considered one of the greatest composers-and music critics-of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810-1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western "art music" well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.