Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design, performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life, whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments, Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi's multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy, composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this project, whilst continuing to pursue the book's broader themes.

Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design, performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life, whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments, Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi's multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy, composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this project, whilst continuing to pursue the book's broader themes.

Due to its plethora of concert halls, publishing houses and piano factories, Paris was one of the leading European capitals of nineteenth-century piano music, able to attract the greatest interpreters of the bravura tradition. The present book takes as its subject the significance and output of the two-composer-pianists mentioned in the title, approaching them from historical, analytical and aesthetical points of view. In so doing the book encompasses many aspects of the Parisian musical scene in which the two composers were involved or to which they were in some way connected. The authors featured are: Michele Calella, Celine Carenco, Andrew Davis, Mariacarla De Giorgi, Christoph Flamm, James Garrat, Ines Guittard, Andrew Haringer, Magdalena Oliferko, Anne Penesco, Cecile Reynaud, David Rowland, Michael Saffle, Laure Schnapper, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald, Renata Suchowiejko, Corey Tu, Andrzej Tuchowski.

In the context of the social culture of Europe, the rise and fall of Wagnerism ushered in a structural change of artistic forms, a process which in some sense manages to lay bare the transformations of modern culture over two entire centuries. What is presented rather as a complex psycho-sociological theorization of the process involved in producing a work of art, in fact manifests itself as a reformulation of ideas in literature and theatre, in criticism and cinema, providing us with a vast and articulate sketch of an almost endless series of those influences which Wagner's oeuvre has been able to give rise to. The purpose of the present work is to expand, in this very direction, the thorough study of a system of convergences and dissonances, whether in the sphere of aesthetics, or in the context of that which remains of the oeuvre in the complex and as yet unfinished history of its reception. The editor's aim has been to examine the Wagnerian influence which is present in the process of politico-geographical transformation of Europe, Russia and the United States from the fin de siecle to the middle of the 20th century. Furthermore, on the same topic, he has striven to cover also the silent revolution which Wagnerism precipitated in literature and in the field of social sciences, its legacy and the inevitable transformations it brought about.