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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.
First Published in 2004. 19th-Century Piano Music focuses on the core composers of the 19th-century repertoire, beginning with 2 chapters giving a general overview of the repertoire and keyboard technique of the era, and then individual chapters on Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, and the women composers of the era, particularly focusing on Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann.
We know Robert Schumann in many ways: as a visionary composer, a seasoned journalist, a cultured man of letters, and a genius who, having passed his mantle on to the young Brahms, succumbed to mental illness in 1856. Drawing on recent pathbreaking research, this collection offers new perspectives on this seminal nineteenth-century figure. In Part I, Leon Botstein and Michael P. Steinberg assess Schumann's efforts to place music at the center of German culture, in public and private sectors. Bernhard R. Appel offers a probing source study of one of Schumann's most personal works, the Album für die Jugend, Op. 68, while John Daverio considers the generic identity of Das Paradies und die Peri,...
Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.
"Discovering Music offers the depth, breadth, and context that students need, in a concise format that is visually appealing. Written to inspire students to connect intellectually and emotionally with music from the Western canon and beyond, the text is supported by a suite of online ancillaries, including interactive listening maps, videos and animations, an instructor's manual, PowerPoint presentations, a computerized test bank, and an interactive eBook. Following the established sequence for Music Appreciation texts, the book opens with an introduction to the musical elements; the instruments of the orchestra; and a discussion of how to listen to music. Then, each musical era is highlighted in individual parts, with a brief introduction to the key composers and developments that occurred in music and the related arts. Individual chapters focus on key figures or movements, with detailed Listening Maps offering unique guidance to students on how and why to listen to each work. In between each part, Global Connections allow students to make connections with non-Western musical traditions"--
"Music appreciation courses focus on helping students develop listening skills to a range of music. Discovering Music is an engaging narrative that introduces students to the elements of music and major style periods in Western music. After learning the elements of music, students study a core repertoire of works, from the middle ages to the present. Todd also helps students engage with the music through its focus on why students should care about each work discussed in the course"--
During the 1830s and 1840s the remarkably versatile composer-pianist-organist-conductor Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy stood at the forefront of German and English musical life. Bringing together previously unpublished essays by historians and musicologists, reflections on Mendelssohn written by his contemporaries, the composer's own letters, and early critical reviews of his music, this volume explores various facets of Mendelssohn's music, his social and intellectual circles, and his career. The essays in Part I cover the nature of a Jewish identity in Mendelssohn's music (Leon Botstein); his relationship to the Berlin Singakademie (William A. Little); the role of his sister Fanny Hensel, her...
When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and 2005, including five previously unpublished, that examine several aspects of the composer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a second Mozart. Mendelssohn Essays explores Mendelssohn’s precocity, his musical impressions of British culture, the role of the visual in his music, his compositional response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and incomplete drafts from his musical estate of three instrumental works. In addition, a group of three essays focuses on the music of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel, perhaps the most gifted woman composer of the century, and a significant, complex figure in the formation of the Mendelssohnian style.
The concert overtures A Midsummer Night's Dream, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), conceived by Mendelssohn before the age of twenty, have ranked amongst the most enduring of the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. R. Larry Todd offers a historical, stylistic, and analytical guide to these three remarkable works which secured for Mendelssohn no small measure of his fame. After placing the overtures in the context of Mendelssohn's astonishing compositional development during the 1820s, the volume disentangles the complex history of their creation and considers in turn their style and formal structure, their contents as programme music, aspects of their orchestration and their reception and influence. All this is supported by a wealth of primary documents, including Mendelssohn's correspondence, memoirs of his friends, and nineteenth-century critical reviews.
This Festschrift celebrates the great Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd, Arts & Sciences Professor at Duke University, whose dedication to, study of, and mentorship in 19th-century music has shaped two generations of musicological study. Encompassing former/current students and colleagues, the contributing authors to this book investigate the life and work of the Mendelssohns, their circle, and issues of reception history; Beethoven and piano-related studies; and special musical relationships. The book's title references a famous quote by Felix Mendelssohn: "The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety." It also acknowledges the thematic diversity of this volume and the unifying effect that Todd's outstanding monographs on Felix and Fanny have had on a variety of musicians and scholars.