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Hector Berlioz was not only a composer, but a renowned writer and critic, and his Memoirs and Evenings with the Orchestra are particularly well-known and loved. This book provides new translations of his criticism in English, taking him from his student days as a participant in musical polemics over Rossini to his first years of mature success.
From 1914 to 1918, religious believers and hopeful skeptics tried to find meaning and purpose behind divinely willed destruction. God on the Western Front is a history of lived religion across national boundaries, religious affiliations, and class during World War I, utilizing an expansive record of primary sources. Joseph F. Byrnes takes readers on a tour of the battlefields of France, listening to the words of German, French, and English soldiers; going behind the lines to hear from the men and women who provided pastoral and medical care; and reviewing the religious writings of priests, bishops, ministers, and rabbis as they tried to make sense of it all. The story begins with citizens at...
Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders takes an unprecedented look at the use of literature in everyday life in one of history's most literate societies-the home ground of the American Renaissance. Using information pulled from four thousand manuscript letters and diaries, Everyday Ideas provides a comprehensive picture of how the social and literary dimensions of human existence related in antebellum New England. Penned by ordinary people-factory workers, farmers, clerks, storekeepers, domestics, and teachers and other professionals-the writings examined here brim with thoughtful references to published texts, lectures, and speeches by the period's canonize...
Parisian theatrical, artistic, social, and political life comes alive in Mark Everist's impressive institutional history of the Paris Odéon, an opera house that flourished during the Bourbon Restoration. Everist traces the complete arc of the Odéon's short but highly successful life from ascent to triumph, decline, and closure. He outlines the role it played in expanding operatic repertoire and in changing the face of musical life in Paris. Everist reconstructs the political power structures that controlled the world of Parisian music drama, the internal administration of the theater, and its relationship with composers and librettists, and with the city of Paris itself. His rich depiction of French cultural life and the artistic contexts that allowed the Odéon to flourish highlights the benefit of close and innovative examination of society's institutions.