During his early years, Franz Liszt worked as a traveling piano virtuoso, his adventures highlighted by his entrée into the literary world as a correspondent for the most popular French journals of his time. In this second volume of Janita Hall-Swadley’s The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, Liszt’s work as a music essayist and journalist is on full display. In his essays, readers will see the influence of the revolutionary theories of Hugues-Felicité Robert de Lamennais, Victor Hugo, and François-René de Chateaubriand as Liszt boldly calls for social reforms on behalf of musicians and musical institutions, from demands for a repertoire of church music of divine praise to the timely publication of inexpensive music editions. In addition to Liszt’s scandalous review of Sigismond Thalberg and the fiery exchange that ensued, the essays include his testimonies to living composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Robert Schumann and the recently deceased Niccolò Paganini. Alongside the essay, this new translation of Liszt’s letters opens a window onto the composer’s immersion in the Italian countryside, where he paints a portrait of a rich musical landscape. Liszt regales his correspondents with amusing anecdotes at Sand’s Italian country estate in Nohant, describes the beautiful landscape and artistic treasures of Italy from his residence on Lake Como, defends himself from Heinrich Heine’s accusations of his “ill-seated” character, discusses the religious aesthetic of Raphael’s painting, and offers his thoughts on the interconnectedness of all the arts. Including two complete facsimile reproductions of the existing manuscripts for “De la situation des artistes” and “Sur Paganini à propos de sa mort,” Essays and Letters of a Traveling Bachelor of Music is a must-read for student and scholars of 19th-century classical music.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetry from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.
In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Chapters offer analyses of concert programming, early music criticism, the compilation of pasticcio operas and songbook miscellanies, and even the ways in which composers and performers shaped their freelancing careers. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.
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.
Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.
This book is the first comprehensive account of classical music on all British radio stations, BBC and commercial, between 1945 and 1995. It narrates the shifting development of those services, from before the launch of the Third Programme until after the start of Classic FM, examining the output from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, as well as recounting some of the stories and anecdotes which enliven the tale. During these fifty years, British classical music radio featured spells of broad, multi-channel classical music radio, with aspirational and mainstream culture enjoying positive interactions, followed by periods of more restricted and exclusive output, in a paradigm of the place of high culture in UK society as a whole. The history was characterised by the recurring tensions between elite and popular provision, and the interplay of demands for highbrow and middlebrow output, and also sheds new light on the continuing relevance of class in Britain. It is an important and unique resource for those studying British history in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as being a compelling and diverting account for enthusiasts for classical music radio.
Since her death in 1179, Hildegard of Bingen has commanded attention in every century. In this book Jennifer Bain traces the historical reception of Hildegard, focusing particularly on the moment in the modern era when she began to be considered as a composer. Bain examines how the activities of clergy in nineteenth-century Eibingen resulted in increased veneration of Hildegard, an authentication of her relics, and a rediscovery of her music. The book goes on to situate the emergence of Hildegard's music both within the French chant restoration movement driven by Solesmes and the German chant revival supported by Cecilianism, the German movement to reform Church music more generally. Engaging with the complex political and religious environment in German speaking areas, Bain places the more recent Anglophone revival of Hildegard's music in a broader historical perspective and reveals the important intersections amongst local devotion, popular culture, and intellectual activities.
Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.