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On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, Ukraine was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe. Between 1941 and 1944, some 1.4 million Jews were killed there, and one of the most important centers of Jewish life was destroyed. Yet, little is known about this chapter of Holocaust history. Drawing on archival sources from the former Soviet Union and bringing together researchers from Ukraine, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, The Shoah in Ukraine sheds light on the critical themes of perpetration, collaboration, Jewish-Ukrainian relations, testimony, rescue, and Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine. Contributors are Andrej Angrick, Omer Bartov, Karel C. Berkhoff, Ray Brandon, Martin Dean, Dennis Deletant, Frank Golczewski, Alexander Kruglov, Wendy Lower, Dieter Pohl, and Timothy Snyder.
A history of music for the imperial court “from a professor, choral director, and professional tenor who has studied Viennese cantatas for half a century” (Lowell Lindgren, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Lawrence Bennett provides a comprehensive study of the rich repertoire of accompanied vocal chamber music that entertained the imperial family in Vienna and their guests throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The cantata became a form of elite entertainment composed to amuse listeners during banquets or pay homage to members of the royal family during special occasions. Concentrating on Baroque cantatas composed in the Habsburg court, Bennett draws extensivel...
Focussing on three different epochs (1700, 1800 and 1900), this book explores the history of music in Vienna, allowing the very different relationships between music and society that existed in each of these periods to be distinguished
"Electra's story is essentially a tale of murder, revenge, and violence. In the ancient myth of Atreus, Agamemnon returns home from battle and receives no hero's welcome. Instead, he is greeted with an ax, murdered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover-accomplice, Aegisthus. Electra chooses anger over sorrow and stops at nothing to ensure that her mother pays. In revenge, Electra, with the help of her brother, orchestrates a brutal and bloody matricide, and her reward is the restitution of her father's good name. Amid all this chaos, Electra, Agamemnon's princess daughter, must bear the humiliation of being treated as a slave girl and labeled a madwoman."--from the Introductio...
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 Companion to Music at the Habsburgs Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Andrew H. Weaver, is the first in-depth survey of Habsburg musical patronage over a broad timeframe. Bringing together existing research and drawing upon primary sources, the authors, all established experts, provide overviews of the musical institutions, the functions of music, the styles and genres cultivated, and the historical, political, and cultural contexts for music at the Habsburg courts. The wide geographical scope includes the imperial courts in Vienna and Prague, the royal court in Madrid, the archducal courts in Graz and Innsbruck, and others. This broad view of Habsburg musical activities affirms the dynasty’s unique position in the cultural life of early modern Europe. Contributors are Lawrence Bennett, Charles E. Brewer, Drew Edward Davies, Paula Sutter Fichtner, Alexander J. Fisher, Christine Getz, Beth L. Glixon, Jeffrey Kurtzman, Virginia Christy Lamothe, Honey Meconi, Sara Pecknold, Jonas Pfohl, Pablo L. Rodríguez, Steven Saunders, Herbert Seifert, Louise K. Stein, and Andrew H. Weaver.
After more than three centuries of silence, the voice of Francesco Cavalli is being heard loud and clear on the operatic stages of the world. The coincidence of productions at La Scala (Milan) and Covent Garden (London) in the same month (September 2008) of two different operas signals a new stage in the recovery of these extraordinary works, confined until now to special venues committed to 'early music'-opera festivals, conservatory, and university productions. The works of the composer who is credited with having invented the genre of opera as we know it are finally enjoying a renaissance. A new edition of Cavalli's twenty-eight operas is in preparation, and the composer and his works are...
Theodor W. Adorno was 21 years old when he travelled to Vienna in March 1925 in order to study musical composition with Alban Berg. This text features the subsequent correspondence between the two men over the course of the next few years, demonstrating how Adorno interpreted the concepts of Berg, Webern and Schönberg.
Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. In the first full-length study of its kind, she reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.
The full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France Formed in 1940, Special Operations Executive was to coordinate Resistance work overseas. The organization's F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known--Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Noor Inayat Khan--others have had their stories largely overlooked. Kate Vigurs interweaves for the first time the stories of all thirty-nine female agents. Tracing their journeys from early recruitment to work undertaken in the field, to evasion from, or capture by, the Gestapo, Vigurs shows just how greatly missions varied. Some agents were more adept at parachuting. Some agents' missions lasted for years, others' less than a few hours. Some survived, others were murdered. By placing the women in the context of their work with the SOE and the wider war, this history reveals the true extent of the differences in their abilities and attitudes while underlining how they nonetheless shared a common mission and, ultimately, deserve recognition.