Franz Schreker, 1878-1934
Franz Schreker, 1878-1934

Author: Christopher Hailey

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1993-03-18

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780521392556

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Franz Schreker was the most frequently performed opera composer of his generation. His controversial works dominated the central European repertory in the years after the First World War and exercised a major influence on such younger contemporaries as Alban Berg, Kurt Weill, and Ernst Krenek. Forced into retirement by Hitler's racial decrees in 1933, the composer, his music banned, died a broken man. Thereafter Schreker became a forgotten chapter in the history of new music. Schreker's music is only now beginning to enjoy a revival. This first major biography not only introduces the reader to this important repertory, but sets the composer's life and works in the context of his turbulent times. Franz Schreker is a dramatic narrative of an artist poised between the intoxicating late Romanticism of fin-de-siecle Vienna and the sober "New Objectivity" of Weimar Berlin, between a precipitous rise to fame and an equally sudden fall from favor in which aesthetic fashion and political intrigue played their parts. Above all, the Schreker phenomenon can provide a key to understanding the evolution of musical thought during the problematic years before and after the First World War.

Julius Bürger
Julius Bürger

Author: Ryan Hugh Ross

Publisher: Böhlau Wien

Published: 2024-04-15

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 3205220757

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Viennese composer Julius Bürger (also named Burger (1897-1995)) intersected with many important figures of 20th century western classical music. Despite success in some of the world's leading opera and broadcasting houses, Burger's true path as a composer was forever altered by the National Socialism. Burger studied with Franz Schreker in Vienna and Berlin. On Bruno Walter's recommendation, Burger later joined Artur Bodanzky as assistant at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1929 he became Otto Klemperer's assistant at Berlin's Kroll Opera, returning to Vienna after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. En route to Vienna from London in 1938, Burger and his wife foresaw what lay in store for Austria and detrained in Paris, abandoning their luggage. In 1939 Burger relocated to America and in 1949 he rejoined the staff at the Metropolitan Opera, starting a close working friendship with Dimitri Mitropoulos. His mother and four of his brothers were murdered in the Holocaust. A fifth brother's fate is still unknown.

Forbidden Music
Forbidden Music

Author: Michael Haas

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0300154313

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DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div

Essays on Literature and Music (1985 – 2013) by Walter Bernhart
Essays on Literature and Music (1985 – 2013) by Walter Bernhart

Author: Walter Bernhart

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 9004302743

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This volume is dedicated to the musico-literary oeuvre of Walter Bernhart, professor of English literature at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz/Austria and pioneer in the field of intermedial relations between literature and other arts and media. It renders accessible a wide variety of texts which are sometimes no longer easily retrievable. The 37 texts collected here in chronological order span the period from 1985 to 2013 and thematically range from contributions to opera programmes and the discussion of musical aspects of Romantic and modernist poetry to inquiries into individual operas and composers as well as into theoretical aspects of word and music relations (e. g. the ways of setting poetry to music, musico-literary ‘comparative poetics’, the concept of ‘genre’ in music and literature, iconicity in both media, their narrative as well as metareferential and illusionist capacities). The volume is of relevance to literary scholars and musicologists but also to all those with an interest in intermediality studies in general and in the relations between literature and music in particular.

Opera
Opera

Author: Guy A. Marco

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-05-03

Total Pages: 655

ISBN-13: 113557801X

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Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Tristan's Shadow
Tristan's Shadow

Author: Adrian Daub

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-11-25

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 022608227X

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Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

Alban Berg and His World
Alban Berg and His World

Author: Christopher Hailey

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-08-09

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1400836476

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An incisive new look at the pivotal modernist composer Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics. The contributors are Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley.

Musical Meaning and Human Values
Musical Meaning and Human Values

Author: Keith Moore Chapin

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0823230090

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Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This collection of essays by leading scholars addresses an aspect of meaning that has not yet received its due: the relation of meaning in this broad humanistic sense to the shaping of fundamental values. The volume examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by both individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value. With a combination of cultural criticism and close readings of musical works, the contributors demonstrate repeatedly that to make music is also to make value, in every sense. They give particular attention to values that have historically enabled music to assume a formative role in human societies: to foster practices of contemplation, fantasy, and irony; to explore sexuality, subjectivity, and the uncanny; and to articulate longings for unity with nature and for moral certainty. Each essay in the collection shows, in its own way, how music may provoke transformative reflection in its listeners and thus help guide humanity to its own essential embodiment in the world. The range of topics is broad and developed with an eye both to the historical specificity of values and to the variety of their possible incarnations. The music is both canonical and noncanonical, old and new. Although all of it is "classical," the contributors' treatment of it yields conclusions that apply well beyond the classical sphere. The composers discussed include Gabrieli, Marenzio, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Puccini, Hindemith, Schreker, and Henze. Anyone interested in music as it is studied today will find this volume essential reading.