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The concept of Schubert as a feminine type began in 1838. This work examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of 19th and early 20th century European culture. The figures discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, and others.
'A book that no serious student should be without... refreshingly sane.' Jeremy Siepmann, Classical Music 'An immensely valuable and well-researched book.' Stephen Haylett, BBC Music Magazine 'Intermittently engrossing...' Susan Bradshaw, Musical Times.
Music and Modern Art adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between these two fields of creative endeavor.
A groundbreaking look at one of the great song composers of the late Romantic period In the virtual cottage industry of works on fin de siècle Vienna, Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) has been somewhat neglected, perhaps because he was the master of a small genre—the late Romantic lied—and never truly made his mark in the larger forms that command greater public attention. But in the realm of song, he is among the greatest inheritors of Schubert and Schumann, one who was both a traditionalist and a modernist. When the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick disapprovingly dubbed Wolf “the Richard Wagner of the lied,” he was paying oblique homage to Wolf’s genius as a song composer in the most mode...
The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women, Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers, as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth century.
Much music was written for the two most important dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings of this dance music, one must be aware of the social contexts and bodily rhythms of the social dances upon which it is based. McKee approaches dance music as a component of a multimedia art form that involves the interaction of physical motion, music, architecture, and dress. Moreover, the activity of attending a ball involves a dynamic network of modalities—sight, sound, bodily awareness, touch, and smell, which can be experienced from the perspectives of a dancer, a spectator, or a musician. McKee considers dance music within a larger system of signifiers and points-of-view that opens new avenues of interpretation.
A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonnière and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.
An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor. Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant.