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Recomposing German Music
This book is a social history of musical life in Berlin; it investigates the tangled relationship between music and politics in 20th-century Germany, emphasizing the division of Berlin's musical community between east and west in the early Cold War era.
Giacomo Meyerbeer
ARSC Awards for Excellence, 2014: Best Historical Research in Classical Music (Certificate of Merit). This book presents a discography of recordings made from the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) – from the inception of recording techniques in 1889 until the dominance of the long-playing record in 1955. It is a testimony to the once-universal fame of the composer and the esteem in which in his works were held. During that period some nearly 2000 artists (at least 1065 of them singers) recorded arias and ensembles from all six of the French operas of Meyerbeer's maturity (Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, L'Étoile du Nord, Dinorah, L'Africaine), as well as selections f...
La Nilsson
First published to wide acclaim in Sweden (1995) and in Germany (1997), the autobiography of opera legend Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005) is finally available in an English translation. From her humble roots in rural Sweden to her artistic triumphs in Stockholm, Bayreuth, Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera House, this candid and utterly charming memoir reveals the personality behind one of the great voices of the past century. Gracefully weaving together the private and professional, Nilsson chronicles her idyllic childhood in Vastra Karup, the early recognition of her unique natural abilities, and her first tentative steps into a wider artistic world. After achieving national acclaim in Verdi's L...
Operetta
Operetta developed in the second half of the 19th century from the French opéra-comique and the more lighthearted German Singspiel. As the century progressed, the serious concerns of mainstream opera were sustained and intensified, leaving a gap between opéra-comique and vaudeville that necessitated a new type of stage work. Jacques Offenbach, son of a Cologne synagogue cantor, established himself in Paris with his series of opéras-bouffes. The popular success of this individual new form of entertainment light, humorous, satirical and also sentimental led to the emergence of operetta as a separate genre, an art form with its own special flavour and concerns, and no longer simply a "little...
The Devil's Music Master
From 1922 until his death in 1954, Wilhelm Furtwangler was the foremost cultural figure of the German-speaking world, conductor of both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. But his decision to remain in Germany when the Nazis came to power earned him condemnation as a Nazi collaborator--"The Devil's Music Master". 30 halftones.
Settling Scores
Classical music was central to German national identity in the early twentieth century. The preeminence of composers such as Bach and Beethoven and artists such as conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler and pianist Walter Gieseking was cited by the Nazis as justification for German expansionism and as evidence of Aryan superiority. In the minds of many Americans, further German aggression could be prevented only if the population's faith in its moral and cultural superiority was shattered. In Settling Scores, David Monod examines the attempted "denazification" of the German music world by the Music Control Branch of the Information Control Division of Military Government. The occupying American force...
Understanding Toscanini
As America's symbol of Great Music, Arturo Toscanini and the "masterpieces" he served were regarded with religious awe. As a celebrity personality, he was heralded for everything from his unwavering stance against Hitler and Mussolini and his cataclysmic tantrums, to his "democratic" penchants for television wrestling and soup for dinner. During his years with the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15) and the New York Philharmonic (1926-36) he was regularly proclaimed the "world's greatest conductor ." And with the NBC Symphony (1937-54), created for him by RCA's David Sarnoff, he became the beneficiary of a voracious multimedia promotional apparatus that spread Toscanini madness nationwide. Accordin...
Music of Exile
What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience? In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile--composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos. Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today's repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape--and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.
