Ferruccio Busoni is most widely known today as the composer of such works as the Second Violin Sonata, the incidental music for Gozzi's Turandot, and the most monumental piano concerto in the repertory (some eighty minutes long, with male chorus in the finale). But Busoni was also renowned in his day as an author and pedagogue and, most especially, as a pianist. Busoni's recordings of pieces by Chopin and Liszt -- and of his own arrangements of keyboard works by Bach and Beethoven -- are much prized and studied today by connoisseurs of piano playing. Yet even his most important biographers...

Luigi Dallapiccola was one of twentieth century's most accomplished and admired composers. His music incorporated many of the twelve-tone techniques developed by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, but blended their expressionistic impulses with an Italianate sense of lyricism. Brian Alegant's The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola traces the evolution of Dallapiccola's compositional technique over a thirty-year period (1942-74). Using both historical and music-analytical lenses, this book documents the influences of Webern and Schoenberg, highlights Dallapiccola's...

Marianna Martines (1744-1813) was one of the most accomplished, prolific, and highly honored female musicians of the eighteenth century. She spent most of her life in a remarkable household that included celebrated librettist Pietro Metastasio, who supervised her education and remained a powerful and supportive mentor. She studied with the young Joseph Haydn, and Vienna knew her as a gifted, aristocratic singer and keyboard player who performed for the pleasure of the Empress Maria Theresa. The regular private concerts she held in her home attracted the presence and participation of some of...

In Good Music for a Free People, author Nancy Newman examines the activities and reception of the Germania Musical Society, an orchestra whose members emigrated from Berlin during the Revolutions of 1848. These two dozen -Forty-Eighters- gave nearly a thousand concerts in North America during the ensuing six-year period, possibly reaching a million listeners. Drawing on a memoir by member Henry Albrecht, Newman provides insights into the musicians' desire to bring their music to the audiences of a democratic republic at this turbulent time. Eager to avoid the egotism and self-promotion of the...

Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata brings to light the life and work of one of France's most distinguished musicians in the most complete biography in any language of Charles-Marie Widor. He is considered one of the greatest organists of his time, a prolific composer in nearly every genre, professor of organ and composition at the Paris Conservatory, academician and administrator at the Institute of France, journalist, conductor, music editor, scholar, correspondent, inspired visionary, and man of deep culture. An appendix constitutes the most complete listing ever compiled of Widor's oeuvre....

Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music fills a unique place in Ravel studies by combining critical interpretation and analytical focus. From the premiere of his works up to the present, Ravel has been associated with masks and the related notions of artifice and imposture. This has led scholars to perceive a lack of depth in his music and, consequently, to discourage investigation of his musical language. This volume balances and interweaves these modes of inquiry. Part 1, "Orientations and Influences," illuminates the sometimes contradictory aesthetic, biographical, and literary...

Some of Franz Liszt's most renowned pieces -- most famously his Hungarian Rhapsodies -- are written in a nineteenth-century Hungarian style known as verbunkos. Closely associated with the virtuosic playing tradition of the Hungarian-Gypsy band, the meaning and uses of this style in Liszt's music have been widely taken for granted and presented as straightforward. Taking a novel transcultural approach to nineteenth-century modernism, Shay Loya presents a series of critiques and sensitive music analyses that demonstrate how the verbunkos idiom, rich and artful in itself, interacted in myriad...

Lies and Epiphanies offers case studies of -inspiration- in five composers -- Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg. Their own tales of their epiphanies played a determining role in the reception history of their works: the finale of Mahler's Second Symphony was supposedly born of a -lightning bolt- of inspiration at the funeral of Hans von Bulow, while Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was purportedly his direct response to the tragic early death of Alma Mahler's daughter. Chris Walton looks behind these tales to explore instead the composer's dual...

Claude Vivier's haunting and expressive music has captivated audiences around the world. But the French-Canadian composer is remembered also because of the dramatic circumstances of his death: he was found murdered in his Paris apartment at the age of thirty-four. Given unrestricted access to Vivier's archives and interviews with Vivier's family, teachers, friends, and colleagues, musicologist and biographer Bob Gilmore tells here the full story of Vivier's fascinating life, from his abandonment as a child in a Montreal orphanage to his posthumous acclaim as one of the leading composers of...

Exploring the crossroads between autobiographical narrative and musical composition, this book examines Berg's transformation of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Buchse der Pandora -- the plays used in the formation of the libretto for Lulu -- according to notions of gender identity, social customs, and the aesthetics of modernity in the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. While Berg modernized several aspects of the plays and incorporated serial techniques of composition from Arnold Schoenberg, he never let go of the idealistic Wagnerian perspectives of his youth. In fact, he went as far as...