This guide to Mozart's two most popular piano concertos--the D minor, K. 466, and the C major, K. 467 (the so-called "Elvira Madigan")--presents the historical background of the works, placing them within the context of Mozart's compositional and performance activities at a time when his reputation as both composer and pianist was at its peak. The special nature of the concerto, as both a form and genre, is explored through a selective survey of some of the approaches that various critics have taken in discussing Mozart's concertos. The concluding chapter discusses a wide range of issues of interest to modern performers.
The three piano concertos contained in this volume were all composed in 1785, when Mozart was 29. High points of one of the most amazingly productive and creatively brilliant periods in the composer's life, yet they are masterworks of very different character: No. 20 (K466 in D Minor), a work of intensity, passion, and spiritual conflict; No. 21 (K467 in C Major), with its luminous, world-famous "Andante, " a work of calm and majesty; and No. 22 (K482 in E-flat Major), music of grace and maturity, said to have "realized the century's ideal whilst yet casting aside the shackles of fashion." These three works are presented here in authoritative two-piano playing editions edited by Franz Kullak and Hans Bischoff, two of the nineteenth century's leading piano editors and teachers of pianists. Their classic format for two keyboards is the universal standard, for students and professionals alike, for learning and rehearsing all piano concertos. It gives the pianist the most accessible form and practical means to prepare a work for performance. To this practicality Dover adds the convenience and economy of compiling three major concertos within a single volume.
Expertly arranged Piano Duet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the Kalmus Edition series. This Advanced Piano Duet (2 Pianos, 4 Hands) is from the Classical era. 2 copies are required for performance.
Classic of music criticism provides detailed studies of 23 of Mozart's piano concertos, offering 417 musical examples and authoritative information on the works' form, tone, style, and balance.
A uniquely illuminating memoir of the making of a musician, in which renowned pianist Jeremy Denk explores what he learned from his teachers about classical music: its forms, its power, its meaning - and what it can teach us about ourselves. In this searching and funny memoir, based on his popular New Yorker article, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. Life is difficult enough as a precocious, temperamental, and insufferable six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey. But then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico, far from classical music’s nerve centers, and he has to please a new taskmaster while navigating cacti, and the perils of junior high school. Escaping from New Mexico at last, he meets a bewildering cast of college music teachers, ranging from boring to profound, and experiences a series of humiliations and triumphs, to find his way as one of the world’s greatest living pianists, a MacArthur 'Genius,' and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall. There are few writers working today who are willing to eloquently explore both the joys and miseries of artistic practice. Hours of daily repetition, mystifying early advice, pressure from parents and teachers who drove him on – an ongoing battle of talent against two enemies: boredom and insecurity. As we meet various teachers, with cruel and kind streaks, Denk composes a fraught love letter to the act of teaching. He brings you behind the scenes, to look at what motivates both student and teacher, locked in a complicated and psychologically perilous relationship. In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk explores how classical music is relevant to 'real life,' despite its distance in time. He dives into pieces and composers that have shaped him – Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, among others – and gives unusual lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. Why and how do these fundamental elements have such a visceral effect on us? He tries to sum up many of the lessons he has received, to repay the debt of all his amazing teachers; to remind us that music is our creation, and that we need to keep asking questions about its purpose.
Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured. The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.
Mozart's Ghosts traces the many lives of this great composer that emerged following his early death in 1791. Crossing national boundaries and traversing two hundred years-worth of interpretation and reception, author Mark Everist investigates how Mozart's past status can be understood as part of today's veneration. Everist forges new paths to reach the composer, examining a number of ways in which Western culture has absorbed the idea of Mozart, how various cultural agents have appropriated, deployed, and exploited Mozart toward both authoritarian and subversive ends, and how the figure of Mozart and his impact illuminate the cultural history of the last two centuries in Europe, England, and America. Modern reverence for the composer is conditioned by earlier responses to his music, and Everist argues that such earlier responses are more complex than allowed by a simple "reception studies" model. Closely linking nine case studies in an innovative cultural and theoretical framework, the book approaches the developing reputation of the composer from death to the present day along three paths: "Phantoms of the Opera" deals with stage music, "Holy Spirits" addresses the trope of the sacred, and "Specters at the Feast" considers the impact of Mozart's music in literature and film. Mozart's Ghosts adeptly moves the study of Mozart reception away from hagiography and closer to cultural and historical criticism, and will be avidly read by Mozart scholars and students of eighteenth-century music history, as well as literary critics, historians of philosophy and aesthetics, and cultural historians in general.
Published as a tribute to the late Stanley Sadie, these eleven essays look at compositional and performance matters, consider new archival research and provide an overview of work since the bicentenary in 1991.
