With the international critical and commercial successes of "Le Declin de l'empire americain" ("The Decline of the American Empire," 1986) and "Jesus de Montreal" ("Jesus of Montreal," 1989) Denys Arcand has risen to the forefront of Canadian filmmaking. These films brought wider recognition to a director whose career spans 30 years and who has played a pivotal role in the development of our perception of French-Canadian cinema. This collection of essays presents a complete portrait of this fascinating filmmaker.

Arcand has consistently produced intelligent and challenging works whose...

Designed to serve music students at the college level, this informal approach to music theory relates the technical aspects of music with the expressive character of the art. The approach is holistic in the sense that it focuses on the interrelationships between the piece as heard by a socially conditioned listener and the notated, performed score: it aims to bridge the gap between the technical and expressive aspects of music. The composers addressed are: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, and Schoenberg. There are separate chapters on the problems of...

This is the first book in English about Domenico Cimarosa, his more than 65 operas and his sacred and secular vocal music, his keyboard music, and his various works for solo instruments and ensembles. This is also the first authoritative book on Cimarosa since an Italian biography published in 1939. Since that earlier tome was published, many important discoveries have come to light. The authors completed most of their research work at the library of the Conservatorio di musica S Pietro a Majella in Naples. Their efforts have uncovered new information on the composer's marriages, wives,...

This literary and critical approach to Wagner's "Ring" provides an original interpretation of the "Ring" tetralogy and challenges the standard political analyses of the work. The "Ring" is examined in the tradition of the Romantic drama as a reworking of Greek tragedy as theoretically expressed in the second part of "Oper und Drama." In the "Ring," using myth as a metaphor for history presents a paradoxical world. The innertextual reflection that Wotan performs in his monologue causes the "Ring" to self-destruct from within. He actually dismantles or deconstructs the text of the "Ring."...

Commemorating the centenary of Tchaikovsky's death, these essays reassess the life and work of the composer from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the musicological and biographical to broader ones addressing his place in the development of the arts in Europe and America. As they make clear, there is much about Tchaikovsky's achievement that has been taken for granted, and the essays included in this collection represent as much acts of reevaluation as of celebration.

After a broad synthesis of Tchaikovsky's relation to the literature, music, and theater of the 18th and...