Today the classical style is defined by the music of a handful of composers, Haydn and Mozart being the most prominent. As a result, the accomplishments of these masters have all but eclipsed the music of most of their contemporaries. In this book, Sterling Murray examines one of the most talented of this group, Antonio Rosetti. Born around 1750 and trained in Bohemia, Rosetti spent most of his creative life in Germany, where he served as music director to the Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein between 1773 and 1789 and then the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin until his death in 1792. The Career of...

Of Bach's four sons who became composers, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88) was the most prolific, the most original, and the most influential both during and after his lifetime. This is the first comprehensive study of his music, examining not only the famous keyboard sonatas and concertos but also the songs, the chamber music, and the sacred works, many of which resurfaced only recently and have not previously been evaluated. A compositional biography, the book surveys C. P. E. Bach's extensive output of nearly a thousand works while tracing his musical development-from his student days...

Toward the end of his life Franz Liszt maintained extensive correspondence with two women who were at the time his closest confidantes, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein and Olga von Meyendorff. Liszt wrote to them regularly, expressing his intimate feelings about personal and career events and his conflicted self-image as a celebrated performer but underappreciated composer. Absent a diary, the letters offer the most direct avenue into Liszt's psyche in his final years. Liszt's Final Decade explores through these letters the mind and music of one of the nineteenth century's most popular...

Wagner's Visions studies crucial influences on Wagner's dramatic style during the years before and just after the failed Dresden revolutionary uprising of 1849. Offering a detailed examination of Die Feen, Wagner's least-known complete opera, together with analysis of Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and the four Ring dramas, Katherine Syer explores the inner experiences of Wagner's protagonists. Sources of particular political significance include the fables of the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, the Iphigenia operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck, and the...

Anton Heiller is one of the twentieth century's most renowned and influential organists. Born in 1923, Heiller was trained in Vienna and rose to prominence quickly, giving his first solo recital at the age of twenty-two. Before concentrating on the organ exclusively, he was a successful conductor of the symphonic repertoire, and, from 1945 until his untimely death in 1979, he was professor of organ at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. His interpretations of Bach, which included registration and articulation, as well as a consideration of the theological underpinnings,...

This collection of letters to and from the eminent harpsichordist, scholar, and early-music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick provides a portrait of the musician from the beginning of his career in Paris in the 1930s to its end in the early 1980s, offering new insights into his work and scholarship. The volume contains letters from Europe to his family as well as correspondence with harpsichord makers, performers, and composers, including Nadia Boulanger, Alexander Schneider, John Kirkpatrick, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, John Challis, Kenneth Gilbert, Serge Koussevitzky, and Vincent Persichetti. In...

The American Academy in Rome launched its Rome Prize in Musical Composition in 1921, a time in the United States of rapidly changing ideas about national identity, musical values, and the significance of international artistic exchange. Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome tells the story of this prestigious fellowship. Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, the book offers new perspectives on a wide range of critical topics: patronage and urban culture, institutions and...

By upbringing, family connections, and education, Felix Mendelssohn was ideally positioned to contribute to the historical legacies of the German people, who in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars discovered that they were a nation with a distinct culture. The number of cultural icons of German nationalism that Mendelssohn -discovered, - promoted, or was asked to promote (by way of commissions) in his compositions is striking: Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press, Durer and Nuremberg, Luther and the Augsburg Confession as the manifesto of Protestantism, Bach and the St. Matthew...

Harry Partch (1901-74) was one of the most distinctive and influential American composers of the mid-twentieth century. During the Great Depression, Partch rode the railways, following the fruit harvest across the country. Although he is renowned for his immense stage works, such as Delusion of the Fury, and his use of highly sophisticated instruments of his own creation, Partch is still regularly called a -hobo composer.- Yet few have questioned this label's impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. Focusing on Partch the person alongside the cultural icon he...

In the nineteenth century, Russian composers and critics were encouraged to cultivate a national style to distinguish their music from the dominant Italian, French, and German traditions. Not Russian Enough? explores this aspiration for a nationalist musical tradition as it was carried out in the cosmopolitan world of opera. Rutger Helmers analyzes the cultural context, music, and reception of four important operas: Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836), Serov's Judith (1863), Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans (1881), and Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride (1899). He discusses such issues as...