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The Early History of the Viol
This book traces the development of the viol from its late medieval Spanish origins to the sixteenth century, when it became the most widely played bowed instrument in western Europe. Ian Woodfield examines the two most important ancestors of the instrument, the Moorish rahab and the vihuela de mano. From these two instruments emerged an early form of viol, the Valencian vihuela de arco, which spread rapidly across the Mediterranean during the papacy of Rodrigo Borgia. The viol was enthusiastically accepted by the d'Este and Gonzaga families and other Italian arbiters before migrating across the Alps and into the rest of Europe. The author discusses all aspects of the viol during its Renaiss...
Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London
This book explores the cultural life of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London. Through primary sources, many analysed for the first time, Ian Woodfield examines such issues as finances, recruitment policy, handling of singers and composers, links with Paris and Italy, and the role of women in opera management.
Music of the Raj
Music of the Raj is a study of musical life in late eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian society, based on the unpublished correspondence of an extended network of families. The writers of these letters - amateurs with a passionate commitment to the art of music - provide a perceptive commentary on many of the major issues of the day: the stylistic change from Baroque to Galant, the replacement of the harpsichord with the pianoforte, the establishment of the musical canon, and the growing economic and cultural influence of women musicians. Among the topics discussed are the transport, tuning and maintenance of instruments, the relationship between amateur pupil and professional teacher, the condu...
The Vienna Don Giovanni
Aspects of Don Giovanni's compositional history are uncovered and the study provides for detailed evidence with which to evaluate Da Ponte's recollections. The essential truth of his account - that the revision of the operain Vienna was an interactive process - seems to be fully borne out. A general theory of transmission is proposed, which clarifies the relationship between the fluid text produced by re-creation and the static text generated by replication. In the year following its 1787 Prague première, Don Giovanni was performed in Vienna. Everyone, according to the well-known account by Da Ponte, thought something was wrong with it. In response, Mozart made changes, producing a Vienna '...
Performing Operas for Mozart
A study of the Prague Italian opera company and its role in performing Mozart's works in the late eighteenth-century.
Mozart's Così Fan Tutte
A groundbreaking new approach proposes answers to many of the opera's unresolved questions.
English Musicians in the Age of Exploration
When Drake set sail from Plymouth harbour on 15 November 1577 at the start of his epic circumnavigation of the world, he had with him on board the Pelican four professional musicians and at least one trumpeter... from the Introduction.The three epoch-making voyages of Columbus (1492), Vasco da Gama (1497 and Magellan (1519 inaugurated the Age of Exploration, the most intensive era of discovery in the history of the world. This book seeks to ascertain what part musicians played in the patterns of settlement which still determine many of the cultural and linguistic boundaries of the present-day world. The focus is on Englishmen, but account will betaken of musicians representing the other lead...
Cabals and Satires
When Joseph II placed his opera buffa troupe in competition with the re-formed Singspiel, he provoked an intense struggle between supporters of the rival national genres, who organized claques to cheer or hiss at performances, and encouraged press correspondents to write slanted notices. It was in this fraught atmosphere that Mozart collaborated with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte on his three mature Italian comedies--Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. In Cabals and Satires: Mozart's Comic Operas in Vienna, Ian Woodfield brings the fascinating dynamics of this inter-troupe contest into focus. He reveals how Mozart, while not immune from the infighting, was able to weather satirical attacks, successfully negotiate the unpredictable twists and turns of theatre politics during the lean years of the Austro-Turkish War, and seal his reputation with a revival of Figaro in 1789 as a Habsburg festive work. Mozart's deft navigation of the turbulent political waters of this period left him well placed to benefit from the revival of the commercial stage in Vienna--the most enduring musical consequence of the war years.
Salomon and the Burneys
Johann Peter Salomon, the celebrated violinist and impresario, made his debut in England in March 1781. History has credited Salomon with bringing Haydn to London, yet as Ian Woodfield reveals in this monograph, Salomon's introduction of the composer to the London musical scene owed as much to luck as to skilful planning. Haydn's engagement in London proved to be a much-needed uplift to Salomon's career which, as Woodfield illustrates, had been on the wane for a number of years. In addition to its reassessment of Salomon's uneven career in London during the 1780s, this book throws light on the general relationship between public and private spheres of professional music-making at the time, and on the relationship between the social and professional attributes required of musicians if they were to be successful. Nowhere are these tensions better illustrated than in the letters and journals of the Burney family, especially those of Susan Burney, which are drawn on in the book to provide a vivid picture of the fiercely competitive musical world of eighteenth-century London.
Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music
This volume illuminates musical connections between Britain and the continent of Europe, and Britain and its Empire. The seldom-recognized vitality of musical theatre and other kinds of spectacle in Britain itself, and also the flourishing concert life of the period, indicates a means of defining tradition and identity within nineteenth-century British musical culture. The objective of the volume has been to add significantly to the growing literature on these topics. It benefits not only from new archival research, but also from fresh musicological approaches and interdisciplinary methods that recognize the integral role of music within a wider culture, including religious, political and social life. The essays are by scholars from the USA, Britain, and Europe, covering a wide range of experience. Topics range from the reception of Bach, Mozart, and Liszt in England, a musical response to Shakespeare, Italian opera in Dublin, exoticism, gender, black musical identities, British musicians in Canada, and uses of music in various theatrical genres and state ceremony, and in articulating the politics of the Union and Empire.
