This book is in German, which may make it of limited interest to people who are not sufficiently familiar with the language.
Birgit Nilsson probably never heard of “the Protestant work ethic,” but she didn’t need to know it.
Once upon a time, there was something known as early music. This was not so much a repertoire, a musico-historical epoch, as an attitude, a counter-cultural group.
Over the past decade, there have been a plethora of works trying to identify the historical models for characters in Puccini’s famous opera Madama Butterfly.
The interpretive reception of medieval music begins, as John Haines lays forth in the present investigation, already during the latter period of the Middle Ages.
True to the title of this collection, the present volume of correspondence edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss — here translated, revised , and supplemented by Antony Beaumont — offers, to date, the most complete body of letters of Gustav Mahler to his wife Alma.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (the “New Grove”) stands as the definitive encyclopedia on music in the English language.1
Introduction: Philip Gossett is one of those rarities in academia: a scholar of the first order and a consummate teacher.
This is a very attractive book, which, in addition to the expected text, has many striking photos, a list of the operas performed in Chicago, indicating all the seasons in which each work was given, and a season by season chronology, limited to professional companies.
This is a highly impressive coffee-table table book, loaded with stunning photographs of productions, singers, composers, and even our nation’s glorious capital.
The world of J.S. Haydn is one gravely underappreciated and undervalued. He never earned the right to a 1980’s bio pic like Mozart or was appreciated and saluted in pop culture through early rock n’ roll like Beethoven.
Some twenty years ago, a leading German musicologist remarked that the music of Parsifal
It must not have been an easy life, being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Perhaps even more so after the fact when scholars began to do their research and “wanna bes” began their intimations and psychoanalyzing. In the more seventy-five years of Mozart scholarship and its coming of age, one must ask: How much more is there to learn, to research?
This new volume from Yale University Press is one of those rare and treasured phenomena in Russian music scholarship that illuminate their subject from a new angle — that of cultural history. Indeed, Boris Gasparov's expressed goal in Five Operas and a Symphony is nothing less than turning the table on poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism that have for so long ruled the field of Slavic research, and elucidating them from a musical point of view.
At a time when the press has made the public aware of the difficult circumstances that exist for the symphony orchestra in the United States, it is refreshing to find a book that demonstrates unequivocally the nature of that institution and, as a consequence, its power in culture.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a weighty play, and Verdi’s Macbeth seems to be a weighty opera: the three volumes of this edition (two of the full score, plus a smaller Critical Commentary containing the critical notes and a description of the sources) weigh 16.6 pounds. It is remarkable to think that this is the first full score of either the 1847 original or the 1865 revised Macbeth ever published.
As far back as the Middle Ages, students (often only identified as Anonymous) have recorded the methods of performance imparted by their masters. In later centuries, such illustrious teachers wrote and published their own methods.
This book examines two of the more interesting musical pieces of the Romantic movement: Romeo et Juliette (1839) and La damnation de Faust (1846). Both were composed by Hector Berlioz (1803-69), and were very much constructed in a Gesamtkunstwerk mode where literature, music, and the other arts are fused together in a hybrid style that defies genre and categorization.
This is a collection of the original libretti to Puccini's Le Villi, Edgar, Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Rondine, Il Trittico (Gianni Schicchi, Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica), and Turandot in nine booklets within a cardboard slipcase.
Throughout the history of Poland, music has been an enduring force in its culture, and Polish composers were at the forefront of a number of developments in the twentieth century.
Books described as a "Companion" to this or that and published by university presses should be required to come with a Reader Beware label. As is the case with many books put out by university and many for-profit publishers, the main reason for publishing these is to advance the tenure and promotion prospects of the authors. This is not a bad thing, except that all too often the books aren't very good.
The publisher knows they won't sell many copies, but university presses in particular are charged with promoting scholarship, and so corners are cut all around, starting with the quality of the scholarship. Often a senior (or more academically secure) figure in a field will recruit fellow academics, often young scholars just beginning their careers, to write chapters. On other occasions someone will organize a conference around a given composer or subject, and the papers given at the conference form the basis of the book. In both cases, consistency and quality frequently are jeopardized. Unless the editor is very conscientious, many of these books make little attempt to adopt a consistent approach throughout, so the reader is confronted with, at best, a mishmash of critical approaches. And getting academics to cooperate and submit their chapters on time is like herding cats, so the chapters may be several years (or more) old.
Fortunately for readers of the Cambridge Companion to the Lied, the editor, James Parsons of Southwest Missouri State University, has been conscientious in his duties, and the cats have been well behaved. The topics here aren't limited to the usual Big Five: Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Strauss. Two chapters on the eighteenth-century Lied explore works by C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart and their predecessors. Among the chapters on the nineteenth-century Lied, one is devoted to the song cycle, and another to instrumental adaptations of Lieder, such as Liszt's versions of Schubert's songs and Mahler's reworkings of his Wunderhorn songs for his symphonies. Sections of the chapter on the Lied at mid-century discuss the songs of Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. The final chapter is a superb discussion of issues in the interpretation of the Lied by accompanist Graham Johnson.
One of the most valuable chapters is Rena Charlin Mueller's discussion of the songs of Franz Liszt. Most of the time, when "Liszt" and "song" are mentioned, we think of his Schubert arrangements or "Oh! quand je dors;" but Mueller shows the importance that Liszt gave to his composition of Lieder and how they reflect his artistic development as much as his piano music or symphonic works.
As is the case in most companions, the authors take various approaches to their subjects, but readers will gain new insights about their favorite composers and songs and encounter some new works to explore via CD or the piano. (One can only hope that people are still exploring new music — or music new to them — on the family upright.) Some authors, like the superb Susan Youens on Hugo Wolf, take a chronological approach. Heather Platt uses published reminiscences by Brahms's only composition student, Gustav Jenner, as the scaffolding for her chapter on his songs. Jürgen Thym devotes some of his discussion of Schumann's songs to key relationships in the song cycles like Dichterliebe. Johnson, in his summing up, also addresses this issue, but from the point of view of practicality: the composer may have woven a most ingenious or subtle network of tonal relationships, but if a singer has difficulty singing all the songs in a set or cycle in the original keys (or transposed), what's more important — keeping the key relationships or interpreting the song?
Quibbles about this volume are few. The chapter on Schubert seems more like a review article, but how can you adequately discuss this most important of all composers of the Lied in a few pages? Enough has been written about Carl Loewe's setting of Goethe's Erlkönig in relation to Schubert's that musical examples comparing their openings are the last thing we need in the all too short section on Loewe. Parson's chapter on the Lied in the twentieth century chooses examples selectively, as well he must, but his very brief section on Othmar Schoeck hardly gives justice to this very important Swiss composer of the Lied. On the plus side, readers won't be frightened off by complicated musical analyses — there's not a Schenker graph to be seen — and academic jargon is kept to a minimum. All in all, lovers of the Lied will find this a valuable addition to their collections and a model of how a "Companion" volume should look.
David Anderson