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 Based on a treasure trove of private documents of Taffanel's previously unpublished letters and papers, Taffanel: Genius of the Flute recounts the rich story of his multi-faceted career as a player, conductor, composer, teacher, and leader of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."

This study score has been off-printed from OUP's conductor's score (available on hire), edited by David Lloyd Jones. Based on Mussorgsky's [Musorgsky's] original autograph from 1867 rather than the famous arrangement by Rimsky-Korsakov, it combines the scholarship of the conductor's edition with the practical benefits of a study score format. This edition takes account of practical performing considerations, where necessary, and includes an introduction by the editor. Orchestral material is available on hire/rental.

This collection of specially commissioned essays on one of the most influential opera composers is divided into four parts, each exploring an important element of Rossini's work and his world. Chapters by specialists chart the course of Rossini's life and career through analysis of his reception; operatic texts and non-operatic works; and the individual works: Tancredi, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Semiramide, and Guillaume Tell.

Matthew Brown examines Debussy's sketches and drafts to show how the composer wrote one of his last great symphonic scores: Ibéria (from Images for orchestra). He describes the work's compositional history, the various intentional goals and historical contraints that guided Debussy's thinking, and some of the technical problems Debussy faced while composing this remarkable score.

This is the largest life-and-works of Musorgsky ever to have appeared outside Russia. Musorgsky created stunning masterpieces in such creations as his opera Boris Godunov and piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition - yet his life was tragic. It is this pathetic tale, interlaced with critical discussion of music, that is this book's concern.

Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise (1843) is a classic textbook by a master of the orchestra, which has not been available in English translation for over a century. This is a book by and about Berlioz, since it provides not only a new translation but also an extensive commentary on his text, dealing with the instruments of Berlioz's time and comparing his instruction with his practice. It is thus a study of the high craft of the most distinctive orchestrator of the nineteenth century.

James Garratt explores the revival of sixteenth-century music in nineteenth-century Germany, focusing on the reception of Palestrina by critics, historians, performers and composers. He demonstrates that the Palestrina revival was just as significant for nineteenth-century culture as parallel movements in the other arts. This study is of relevance to scholars, students and devotees of nineteenth-century music, as well as those with interests in nineteenth-century culture, art, architecture, literature and aesthetics, the history of church music and the early music revival.

This study includes selected songs for voice and piano composed by Schubert between 1822 and his death on November 19, 1828. Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis circa late 1822, and many of the songs discussed were written with his knowledge of impending death. It is possible to discover within them a late song style, full of elegiac references to Schubert's other death-haunted works and marked by distinctive variation techniques. Youens also introduces six of the poets whose texts were set to music by Schubert.

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.

Brahms has long been considered an arch-conservative, the last Classical master, but modern research reveals a troubled and self-critical Romantic whose genius united the emotionalism of his times with Classical principles. Malcolm MacDonald demonstrates how the musical and personal character of this great composer are inextricably intwined: how the man speaks in his music.

Revised to mark the centenary of Tchaikovsky's death and the recent upsurge of interest in his music, Edward Garden's study assesses the operas, ballets and other works against the background of the composer's eventful life: his ill-judged marriage, his curious pen-friendship with his patron Nadezhda von Meck, and his relationship with Balakirev and other Russian composers. Edward Garden also examines conflicting theories on the manner of Tchaikovsky's death.

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.

Perhaps no twentieth-century composer has provoked a more varied reaction among the music-loving public than Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Originally hailed as a new Beethoven by much of the Anglo-Saxon world, he was also widely disparaged by critics more receptive to newer trends in music. At the height of his popular appeal, he was revered as the embodiment of Finnish nationalism and the apostle of a new musical naturalism. Yet he seemingly chose that moment to stop composing altogether, despite living for three more decades. Providing wide cultural contexts, contesting received ideas about modernism, and interrogating notions of landscape and nature, "Jean Sibelius and His World" sheds new light on the critical position occupied by Sibelius in the Western musical tradition.

The essays in the book explore such varied themes as the impact of Russian musical traditions on Sibelius, his compositional process, Sibelius and the theater, his understanding of music as a fluid and improvised creation, his critical reception in Great Britain and America, his "late style" in the incidental music for "The Tempest," and the parallel contemporary careers of Sibelius and Richard Strauss.

Documents include the draft of Sibelius's 1896 lecture on folk music, selections from a roman a clef about his student circle in Berlin at the turn of the century, Theodor Adorno's brief but controversial tirade against the composer, and the newspaper debates about the Sibelius monument unveiled in Helsinki a decade after the composer's death.

The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Philip Ross Bullock, Glenda Dawn Goss, Daniel Grimley, Jeffrey Kallberg, Tomi Makela, Sarah Menin, Max Paddison, and Timo Virtanen."

This book is the first major publication devoted to the music of Janacek, now widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. The essays, all by leading scholars, deal with a broad range of subjects relating to opera, symphonic poem, instrumental music, cultural context and reception. Some topics, such as the sources of Janacek's musical expressivity, questions of narrative, Janacek as musical analyst and Janacek as realist, are considered seriously for the first time, whilst other more conventional topics, such as 'speech melody' and Janacek's ethnographic activities, are reappraised. A transcription of Janacek's analytical study of 'Jeux de vagues' from Debussy's La mer is published for the first time, and this document is considered in the light of Janacek's theory of music as a whole and of the reception of La mer.

Richard Strauss saw an empire come and go, survived two world wars, witnessed the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, endured the period of National Socialism, and died the year that Germany was officially divided into two separate states. All the while he enjoyed a successful career as composer, as conductor of international stature, as organizer for the rights of composers, and as colleague of and collaborator with some of the most important composers, writers, and artists of his day. This biography covers Strauss's early musical development, his emergence as a tone poet in the late nineteenth century, his turn to the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, the successes and failures of the post-World War I era, the turbulent 1930s, and the period of the Second World War and its aftermath.

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.

Berlioz was arguably the greatest French composer of the nineteenth century. Although the author of the Symphonie fantastique was possessed of a fertile imagination and sometimes obsessed by love, the image of Berlioz as a misunderstood and mistreated genius obscures both the solidity of his work as a musical architect and the reality of his position as one sometimes favored by those in power. This Life of Berlioz situates the celebrated French musician in the vibrant and highly politicized musical culture in which he lived and worked as composer, conductor, concert manager, and writer. Bloom's biography--based on special familiarity with archival sources and the composer's only recently made available writings--projects a noncaricatural and enormously talented Berlioz occupied with the practical details of polishing scores and articles, arranging concerts and tours, making connections with those in power, and making an independent career in the age of incipient free enterprise.

'That great blue Sphinx', Debussy called the sea. Debussy himself was something of a Sphinx: in the early 1890s he was thinking of 'founding a society for musical esotericism', and although, on the surface, most of his music is instantly engaging and accessible, at a deeper level run currents that are dangerous, unpredictable, destructive. In this new biography, Roger Nichols considers the life and music of this seminal figure, charting the currents and the whirlpools in which other humans were sometimes unlucky enough to get caught. Debussy's status is such that no modern composer has been able to ignore him, asking, as he does, any number of riddles to which late twentieth-century music is still searching for answers.

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.

The "Beethoven Syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general-and not just Beethoven-in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of "New Objectivity" marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Masterfully citing a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, Mark Evan Bonds's engaging study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening.

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 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.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating, important, and influential figures in the history of British music. He rose from humble beginnings and achieved fame with music that to this day is beloved by audiences in England, and his work has secured an enduring legacy worldwide. Leading scholars examine the composer's life in "Edward Elgar and His World," presenting a comprehensive portrait of both the man and the age in which he lived.

Elgar's achievement is remarkably varied and wide-ranging, from immensely popular works like the famous "Pomp and Circumstance" March no. 1--a standard feature of American graduations--to sweeping masterpieces like his great oratorio "The Dream of Gerontius." The contributors explore Elgar's Catholicism, which put him at odds with the prejudices of Protestant Britain; his glorification of British colonialism; his populist tendencies; his inner life as an inspired autodidact; the aristocratic London drawing rooms where his reputation was made; the class prejudice with which he contended throughout his career; and his anguished reaction to World War I. Published in conjunction with the 2007 Bard Music Festival and the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth, this elegant and thought-provoking volume illuminates the greatness of this accomplished English composer and brings vividly to life the rich panorama of Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Rachel Cowgill, Sophie Fuller, Daniel M. Grimley, Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, Deborah Heckert, Charles Edward McGuire, Matthew Riley, Alison I. Shiel, and Aidan J. Thomson.

This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today.
Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and cliche. Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life.
"Nineteenth-Century Music" contains 90 illustrations, the collected captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.