In 1893 Clara Lindow sang the ballad Dreamtide to her own guitar accompaniment in the Cumbrian hamlet of Lowick. A writer for the local newspaper not only admired her 'marked skill and ability' but also considered the concert to be a sign of 'the onward march of light and learning in our time'. Amateurs like Miss Lindow were at the heart of a Victorian revival of guitar playing, especially for accompanying the voice, which has never been fully acknowledged and has often been denied. This b...

Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher ...

This is the first history of the guitar during the reign of the Stuarts, a time of great political and social upheaval in England. In this engaging and original volume, Christopher Page gathers a rich array of portraits, literary works and other, previously unpublished, archival materials in order to create a comprehensive picture of the guitar from its early appearances in Jacobean records, through its heyday at the Restoration court in Whitehall, to its decline in the first decades of th...

Burne-Jones’ oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as far removed from the Birmingham of his youth as possible. At that time Birmingham was a byword for the dire effects of unregulated capitalism – a booming, industrial conglomeration of unimaginable ugliness and squalor. The two great French symbolist painters, Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, immediately recognised Burne-Jones as an artistic fellow traveller. But, it is very unl...

To evaluate the familiar, even over-familiar, story of Handel's life could be seen as a quixotic endeavour. How can there be anything new to say? This book seeks to distinguish fact from fiction, not only to produce a new biography but also to explore the concepts of biography and dissemination by using Handel's life and lives as a case study. By examining the images of Handel to be found in biographies and music histories - the genius, the religious profound, the master of musical styles,...

In the early nineteenth century over forty operas by foreign composers, including Mozart, Rossini, Weber and Bellini, were adapted for London playhouses, often appearing in drastically altered form. Such changes have been denigrated as 'mutilations'. The operas were translated into English, fitted with spoken dialogue, divested of much of their music, augmented with interpolations and frequently set to altered libretti. By the end of the period, the radical changes of earlier adaptations g...

This reference seeks to identify and briefly annotate a wide range of subjects relating to English musical culture, largely from the early 15th century through 1958, dates that reflect the coalescence of an identifiable English style in the early Renaissance and the death of the iconic Ralph Vaughan Williams in the mid-20th century. Some of the truly great "English" composers figuring in this volume include Johann Christian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Georg Frideric Handel, along with sin...

British music in the era from the death of Henry Purcell to the so-called 'Musical Renaissance' of the late nineteenth century was once considered barren. This view has been overturned in recent years through a better-informed historical perspective, able to recognise that all kinds of British musical institutions continued to flourish, and not only in London. The publication, performance and recording of music by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British composers, supplemented by criti...

In recent years there has been a considerable revival of interest in music in eighteenth-century Britain. This interest has now expanded beyond the consideration of composers and their music to include the performing institutions of the period and their relationship to the wider social scene. The collection of essays presented here offers a portrayal of concert life in Britain that contributes greatly to the wider understanding of social and cultural life in the eighteenth century. Music w...

Less well-known than his brothers, Edward IV and Richard III, little has been written about George, Duke of Clarence, leaving us with a series of unanswered questions: What was he really like? What set him and his brother Edward IV against one another? And who was really responsible for his death? George played a central role in the 'Wars of the Roses', played out by his family. But was George for York or Lancaster? Is the story of his drowning in a barrel of wine really t...

The first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, and the most complete telling of his life and times to date.NOMINATED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2019'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade' TLS'Simply the best modern biography of Wilde... A terrific achievement' Evening Standard'Page-turning... Vivid and desperately moving. However much you think you know ...

Jonathan Keates original biography of Handel was hailed as a masterpiece on its publication in 1985. This fully revised and updated new edition - published to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the composers death - charts in detail Handel's life, from his youth in Germany, through his brilliantly successful Italian sojourn, to the opulence and squalor of Georgian London where he made his permanent home.For over two decades Handel was absorbed in London's heady but precarious ope...