You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Volume 4 is devoted to the last years (1857-64); while age and declining health saw a waning of the composer's personal optimism. It contains a series of glossaries listing his compositions and the musical and theatrical works he attended throughout his life, as well as a bibliography.
Castelvecchi presents a critical re-evaluation of the operatic genre system and the cult of sensibility in the age of Mozart.
None
The use of historical recordings as primary sources is relatively well established in both musicology and performance studies and has demonstrated how early recording technologies transformed the ways in which musicians and audiences engaged with music. This edited volume offers a timely snapshot of a wide range of contemporary research in the area of performance practice and performance histories, inviting readers to consider the wide range of research methods that are used in this ever-expanding area of scholarship. The volume brings together a diverse team of researchers who all use early recordings as their primary source to research performance in its broadest sense in a wide range of r...
The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained t...
Giacomo Meyerbeer was once one of the most famous of all opera composers, enjoying into the twentieth century the same universal admiration and performance as a composer like Puccini does today. Through a series of adverse factors, his reputation was seriously damaged with the resurgence of nationalism and the growing ant-Semitism in France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the propagation of a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic, the decline of the bel canto vocal tradition, and the disfavour manifested towards the heroism of French grand opera. All these factors, and especially the ban on his music in Nazi Germany, meant that Meyerbeer’s reputation was seriously overshadowed in ...
When Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, the long lasting bilateral relations changed fundamentally. Immediately, the administration of the ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’ responsible for culture and therein music together with the Norwegian puppet regime’s department for culture implemented the adaption to the new, official National Socialist guidelines. The diversity of music in Norway during the occupation is presented in this book by Norwegian and German authors, confronting research on collaboration, persecution, and resistance for the first time as an international endeavour. The different essays illustrate not only examples of exile and persecution and ask for the consequences...
Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filte...
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism brings together international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to provide a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries.
Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s, and the influential stage music that emerged from this period helped make Paris, as Walter Benjamin put it, the “capital of the nineteenth century.” The fullest account available of this artistic ferment and its international impact, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer explores the diverse institutions that shaped Parisian music and extended its influence across Europe, the Americas, and Australia. The contributors to this volume, who work in fields ranging from literature to theater to musicology, focus on the city’s musical theater scene as a whole rather than on individual theaters or repertories. Their broad range enables their collective examination of the ways in which all aspects of performance and reception were affected by the transfer of works, performers, and management models from one environment to another. By focusing on this interplay between institutions and individuals, the authors illuminate the tension between institutional conventions and artistic creation during the heady period when Parisian stage music reached its zenith.