Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall explores interconnections of the sacred and the secular in music and aesthetic debates of the long nineteenth century. The essays in this volume view the category of the sacred not as a monolithic attribute that applies only to music written for and performed in a religious ritual. Rather, the “sacred” is viewed as a functional as well as a topical category that enhances the discourse ...

Tyranny and Music is an edited collection of essays that explore how musical artists respond to cruel or oppressive governments and ruling regimes. Its primary strength and unique quality lies in its diversity, presenting a postmodern collage of scholarship that reaches across the divides of classical, popular and traditional musics just as it connects musical resistance of the past with the present and the near (Western) with the far (non-Western). Contemporary topics include Chosan’s ana...

Renowned music historian Philipp Spitta has written that “of all the German musicians of the 19th century, none has exercised a greater influence over his own generation and that succeeding it than Weber.” Spitta’s statement reflects Weber’s popularity at the end of the nineteenth 19th century—both for his place as a foundational figure of German Romantic opera and for his role in the early German Nationalist movement in music. Indeed, Weber’s Der Freischütz is still considered the first G...

Scholars have long recognized Carl Maria von Weber as the father of the German Romantic and Nationalist music. The success of his opera Der Freischütz almost single handedly brought German operatic style onto the world stage, competing with and challenging established operatic traditions in France and Italy. Indeed the overtures to his last three operas, Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon initiated the genre of the concert overture and are a part of the standard repertoire for most mode...

Chronicling the landmark events in Beethoven's life, this book enhances understanding of the composer's character, inspiring a deeper appreciation for his work.George Alexander Fischer illuminates the composer’s difficult childhood, his struggle to maintain friendships and romances, his ungovernable temper, his obsessive efforts to control his nephew’s life, and the excruciating decline of his hearing. This absorbing narrative provides a comprehensive account of a momentous life, as...

First published in 1878. Chapters cover: Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Web, Mendelssohn, and Wagner.

18 November, 1741. George Frideric Handel, one of the world's greatest composers, arrives in Dublin – the second city of the Empire – to prepare his masterpiece, Messiah, for its maiden performance the following spring …In Hallelujah, Jonathan Bardon, one of Ireland's leading historians, explores the remarkable circumstances surrounding the first performance of Handel's now iconic oratorio in Dublin, providing a panoramic view of a city in flux – at once struggling to contain the chaos unl...

The Faber Pocket Guide to Handel offers a detailed but accessible exploration of George Frederick Handel, his composition, and his legacy. A larger-than-life figure in his time, Handel's reputation has been less than steady since his death in 1759. Was he (in the words of Berlioz) just 'a great barrel of pork and beer', or (as Handel himself claimed) truly 'the master of us all'? Now, more than 250 years after his death, there is more interest in Handel than ever before, with his ...

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism.

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was...

Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' – a symbolic duo, who represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast was to shape the composition, performance, reception and historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogu...

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume ai...