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“Badura-Skoda addresses the place of the piano in the eighteenth century from the perspective of a scholar and performer” (Eighteenth-Century Music). In the late seventeenth century, Italian musician and inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori developed a new musical instrument—his cembalo che fa il piano e forte, which allowed keyboard players flexible dynamic gradation. This innovation, which came to be known as the hammer-harpsichord or fortepiano grand, was slow to catch on in musical circles. However, as renowned piano historian Eva Badura-Skoda demonstrates, the instrument inspired new keyboard techniques and performance practices and was eagerly adopted by virtuosos of the age, including Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Clementi, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Presenting a rich array of archival evidence, Badura-Skoda traces the construction and use of the fortepiano grand across the musical cultures of eighteenth-century Europe, providing a valuable resource for music historians, organologists, and performers. “Badura-Skoda has written a remarkable volume, the result of a lifetime of scholarly research and investigation. . . . Essential.” —Choice
Part history, part explanation of early music, this book also plays devil's advocate, criticizing current practices and urging experimentation. Haynes, a veteran of the movement, describes a vision of the future that involves improvisation, rhetorical expression, and composition.
Few people these days would question Mozart's rating as the most popular of all classical composers. Yet there exists no substantial, up-to-date English-language study of the man and his works. In this new study of Mozart's early years, Stanley Sadie aims to fill this gap in the form of a traditional biography on a straightforward chronological basis. The volume covers the period up to 1781, the year of Idomeneo and Mozart's settling in Vienna. Individual works are discussed in sequence and related to the events of his life. Stanley Sadie draws substantially on the family correspondence, quoting the letters and discussing what they tell us about Mozart and his world and his relationships with his family and his professional colleagues. Also included is a discussion of all aspects of Mozart's life and his music, relating them to the environment in which he worked, social, economic and cultural as well as musical. Much new material connected with Mozart has come to light in recent years. There have been discoveries of musical sources and new ways of studying known ones. Such finds and methods have changed our view of the chronology of many works and they often have significant biographical ramifications. Understanding of the context for Mozart's music, and indeed his life, has broadened immensely. Stanley Sadie's biography digests and interprets this corpus of new information.
Opera has always been controversial, not only because of how vastly expensive it is to produce. It has historically been a vital and complex mixture of high art and commerce, socially elite and popular or middle-class, the new and the increasingly old. When a city wants a new landmark building, an opera house is very often the solution: why should this still be the case? The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by looking at how it evolved from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most arthritically canonic art forms still in existence. This new collection addresses questions that are key to opera's past, present and future. Why is the art form apparently so arthritically canonical, with the top ten titles, all more than a century old, accounting for nearly a quarter of all performances world-wide? Why is this top-heavy system of production becoming still more restrictive, even while the repertory is seemingly expanding, notably to include early music? Why did the operatic canon evolve so differently from that of concert music? And why has that evolution attracted so comparatively little attention from scholars? Why, finally, if opera houses all over the world are dutifully honoring their audiences' loyalty to these favorite works, are they having to struggle so hard financially? Answers to these and other problems are offered here by 26 musicologists, historians, and industry professionals working in a wide range of contexts. Topics range from the seventeenth century to the present day, and from Russia to England and continental Europe to the Americas. In an effort to reflect the contested nature of most of the issues facing opera, each topic is addressed by two essays, introduced jointly by the respective authors, and followed by a jointly compiled list of further reading. These paired essays complement each other in different ways: for example, by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting or changing contexts. Posing its questions in fresh, provocative terms, The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon challenges scholarly assumptions and expectations, and breathes fresh air into the fields of music and cultural history.
