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Beethoven's Lives
Beethoven's Lives will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding how Beethoven biography has evolved through the ages. When Ludwig van Beethoven died in March 1827, the world of music felt an intense loss. The composer's funeral procession was one of the largest Vienna had ever witnessed, and the poet Franz Grillparzer's eulogy brought the tensions between the composer's life and music into sharp focus: the deaf and aloof genius, the alienated and eccentric artist, unable to form a lasting relationship with a woman but reaching out to mankind. These apparent contradictionswere to attract many Beethoven biographers yet to come. Here, Lewis Lockwood, himself a much-lauded Beet...
Opening Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is recognized worldwide, associated with the heights of artistic achievement and a multitude of famous performers. Yet its beginnings are not so well known. In 1887, a chance encounter on a steamship bound for Europe brought young conductor Walter Damrosch together with millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and his new wife, Louise. Their subsequent friendship led to the building of this groundbreaking concert space. This book provides the first comprehensive account of the conception and building of Carnegie Hall, which culminated in a five-day opening festival in May 1891, featuring spectacular music, a host of performers and Tchaikovsky as a special guest conductor.
Adaptations of Laurence Sterne's Fiction
Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. I...
American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century
Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today. But as this book reveals, audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall. And what they heard weren’t just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in ni...
Berlioz and His World
A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre an...
Singing for Freedom
divdivIn the two decades prior to the Civil War, the Hutchinson Family Singers of New Hampshire became America’s most popular musical act. Out of a Baptist revival upbringing, John, Asa, Judson, and Abby Hutchinson transformed themselves in the 1840s into national icons, taking up the reform issues of their age and singing out especially for temperance and antislavery reform. This engaging book is the first to tell the full story of the Hutchinsons, how they contributed to the transformation of American culture, and how they originated the marketable American protest song. /DIVdivThrough concerts, writings, sheet music publications, and books of lyrics, the Hutchinson Family Singers established a new space for civic action, a place at the intersection of culture, reform, religion, and politics. The book documents the Hutchinsons’ impact on abolition and other reform projects and offers an original conception of the rising importance of popular culture in antebellum America./DIV/DIV
Margaret Fuller
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.
Resonant Gaps
Resonant Gaps examines the ways in which Charles Baudelaire exploited certain powers of figurative language while writing on music, particularly that of Richard Wagner. Unlike many recent music/literature studies, Margaret Miner focuses less on the possible convergences of text and music than on their productive distances and divergences. At the heart of this study is Baudelaire's 1861 essay Richard Wagner et Tannhauser à Paris, which is included in this volume in the French text of the 1861 Dentu edition. Called a "long-meditated work of circumstance" by its author, Richard Wagner is the only piece of music criticism that Baudelaire ever attempted, despite the prominence of music as a them...
Lying Up a Nation
What is black music? For some it is a unique expression of the African-American experience, its soulful vocals and stirring rhythms forged in the fires of black resistance in response to centuries of oppression. But as Ronald Radano argues in this bracing work, the whole idea of black music has a much longer and more complicated history-one that speaks as much of musical and racial integration as it does of separation.
Listening in Paris
Beginning with the simple question, "Why did audiences grow silent?" Listening in Paris gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today. Drawing from a wide range of sources—novels, memoirs, police f...
