An expert's guide to the skills of the greatest conductors While Weber, Spohr, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz were all conductors of repute, it was the thoughts and practices of Richard Wagner that laid the foundation for the modern virtuoso conductor. Though he was more celebrated for his dramatic operas, Wagner's experience as a conductor brought a set of practices and principles that affected the interpretations of future generations, and conductors continue to pursue his example today. This book examines Wagner's conducting career and the principles of his musical performance. It then tracks the central European style through some of the greatest figures of modern music-Nikisch, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Weingartner, Furtwangler, Toscanini, Walter, Klemperer, Beecham, Boult, and others through to von Karajan, Bernstein, and George Szell. In each case Holden, himself a professional classical conductor, traces the rise from apprenticeship to international acclaim, comparing rehearsal technique, the baton, eye contact, repertoire, tempo, recordings, vision, style, and performance practice. The result is a deeply informative, intriguing, and highly readable portrait of the finest exponents of the conducting tradition.

Only recently has it become obvious that conductors' annotated scores and marked orchestral parts are of great cultural, historical and musical importance. In the not-so-distant past, these artefacts had something of an uncertain status with many either languishing unopened in libraries and family archives or simply being dispersed or discarded. With the help of institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, Harvard University and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra this has begun to change with their extensive collections of these materials now being made available to scholars and musicians. This element examines the emergence of these artefacts as didactic and interpretative tools and explores the ways in which the performance styles of ten iconic conductors active in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries are reflected in their annotated scores and marked orchestral parts of Mozart's Symphony No. 41, K. 551 ('Jupiter').

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!