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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.
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.
The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky joins more than a dozen similar volumes published by the Cambridge University Press over the years and devoted to the life and works of a single composer. Each one traditionally is a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, organized into three main sections — biography; works (mostly by genre); reception and posthumous legacy.
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 practice became particularly popular during the Age of Enlightenment when treatises were produced for a growing market of dilettantes who wished to learn the rudiments of singing and playing instruments. Famous examples include Leopold Mozart Violinschule (1756) and J.S. Bach’s son Carl Philip Emanuel’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753 and 1762). Musical treatises took on new significance in the nineteenth century; with the rise of the rise of the conservatory and the increasing emphasis on musical performance in the middle-class home, famous performers who became noted teachers put pen to paper to share their techniques with an ever-increasing market of literate amateurs. Hence, it was possible to partake of a conservatory experience without ever leaving the comfort of one’s own parlor or salon.
Fuzeau Editions has published several series of these treatises in facsimile, gathering volumes of various categories so that they can be consulted together. One such series is a compilation of voice treatises and methods written by important virtuosi and pedagogues of the Romantic Age (although the title suggests a timeline from 1800-1860, the earliest volume dates from 1804 and the latest, 1870); among the authors included are Girolamo Crescentini, both Manual Garcias (father and son), Gioachino Rossini, Gilbert Louis Duprez, Luigi Lablache, and François-Joseph Fétis. Each of the seven volumes contains two or three methods at, as Fuzeau proclaims, reasonable costs. If purchased in toto, the series can be had for 424,000 euros, a savings of 116 euros were each book bought separately. The individual volumes range from 44 to 84 euros (roughly 50 to $100). Purchasers initially might think the publications costly, but compared to the price of a trip to a major research institution to consult the originals, it seems more palatable.
Volume IV of the series includes three important mid-century works, listed here as they appear: Manual Garcia, fils’ Traité complet de l’art du chant (1847), Laure Cinti-Damoreau’s Méthode de chant (1849), and Joseph (Giuseppe) Concone’s Introduction à l’art de bien chanter (c. 1845). Garcia, son of the singer who premiered the role of the Count in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, abandoned his own career as a baritone when he exhibited vocal woes while performing in New York. Far more important was his work as a teacher; among his students were his own sisters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, and Jenny Lind, Erminia Frezzolini, Mathilde Marchesi, and Julius Stockhausen. His main significance, however, comes from his scientific study of the construction of the vocal apparatus; his experiments with the laryngoscope, a small mirror with which the vocal mechanism could be viewed, brought the art of singing into the world of science. Cinti-Damoreau had a highly successful career as a soprano at both the Opéra and the Thêátre-italien. Imitating the techniques she heard from her Italian colleagues, she is remembered as a Rossinian soprano, having premiered roles in his Le Siège de Corinthe, Moïse, Le comte Ory, and Guillaume Tell. She taught at the Paris Conservatoire for 23 years; the lessons and exercises that comprise her Méthode were approved as a text for that institution’s vocal curriculum. After a brief career as a singer, Concone taught in Paris, overlapping Cinti-Damoreau’s teaching career by one year; holding her art in high esteem, he dedicated his own book to her as an “expression of recognition and admiration.” Indeed, the network of influence among all the authors in this series is noteworthy. Concone notes as well that he drew his exercises from Rossini’s Gogheggi e solfeggi (1827; see Volume III of this series; Cinti-Damoreau shares cadenzas she performed in roles in Cenerentola, Il barbiere, and Le comte Ory, among others. Garcia’s method, save for his own pioneering work in the study of the human voice, derives from his father’s Exercices pour la voix (c. 1835; also in Volume III).
Of course, facsimiles have their pros and cons. In their favor, such publications exactly replicate the content and appearance of works as they were published initially. Hence, there is no chance that textual passages or accompanying musical examples would be accidentally eliminated. The job of the series editor is to locate the sources to be included; the Chant series editor, Jeanne Roudet, notes that the provenance of the originals came from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the British Library. Thus, readers and researchers can consult a duplication of the original work rather than an actual edited text. One obvious problem, though, is language; a reader must be fluent in the writer’s tongue to understand the work (of the seventeen methods in the series, fifteen are in French and two in Italian). Although some of these works are available in translation, one is then always at the mercy of someone else’s interpretation. Since a fair portion of these methods includes musical examples and exercises, however, it is almost worth investing in a good language dictionary and having a go at the original text. In truth, one could study the various techniques simply by performing the exercises in ornamentation, vocalization, and etudes that drew on the vocal music of the day. Fortunately, the language of music is universally understood.
One slight drawback of this series is the physical size of the volumes. Printed on fine but heavy stock, the large volumes (9¼ by 13 inches) have a soft cover, making them awkward to use. The size, of course, approximates that of the originals; printed separately, they were manageable books with hard covers. Two or three bound together makes for an unwieldy volume. Anyone considering one or more of the series with the intention of serious usage would do well to invest in making them hardbound. A quick note on page numbers: each facsimile bears continuous pagination at the bottom center of each page while the original page numbers appear at the top verso and recto.
Singers (both students and pedagogues) who aim for an informed performance of the French and Italian repertories from this time period will want to consult (or even own) these facsimiles. If music libraries do not automatically subscribe to the Fuzeau Fac-similes, they would be wise to purchase the entire series because the cost of originals, if they even can be located on the rare book market, is decidedly more. Opera lovers who read music will enjoy glancing through method books like those of Garcia, Cinti-Damoreau and Concone, for they explain from the inside out how singers once learned their craft.
Denise Gallo
