The connections between a great artist's life and work are subtle, complex, and often highly revealing. In the case of Beethoven, however, the standard approach has been to treat his life and his art separately. Now, Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative.

Cooper employs a strictly chronological approach that enables each work to be seen against the musical and biographical background from which it emerged. The result is a much closer confluence of life and...

Nearly one hundred years after the death of its composer, the music of Claude Debussy has lost none of its breadth of appeal. With the rare ability to entice listeners on many levels, at its heart lies an engaging simplicity-one which defies traditional analysis and lends mystery to what ultimately is an extremely refined and highly personal approach to composition. Equally fascinating is Debussy's often contradictory personality--at times elusive, but always centered on his devotion to music and his ambition to create a name for himself unlike any other.

Author Eric Frederick Jensen...

Edward MacDowell was born on the eve of the Civil War into a Quaker family in lower Manhattan, where music was a forbidden pleasure. With the help of Latin-American emigre teachers, he became a formidable pianist and composer, spending twelve years in France and Germany establishing his career. Upon his return to the United States in 1888 he conquered American audiences with his dramatic Second Piano Concerto and won his way into their hearts with his poetic Woodland Sketches. Columbia University tapped him as their first professor of music in 1896, but a scandalous row with...

Today Georges Bizet is most immediately recognized as the composer of the acclaimed opera Carmen. One of the most frequently performed operas for over a century, Carmen explores concepts such as the femme fatale and murderous jealousy with vivacity, color, and a wealth of melody. Yet it is only one act in Bizet's story. In Bizet, renowned musicologist Hugh Macdonald goes beyond the composer's most famous opera to take an in-depth look at his entire life and oeuvre. In so doing, Macdonald identifies a number of previously unknown pieces by Bizet, assembling the first...

In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his...

In this fully updated edition of his long-indispensable study, Malcolm MacDonald takes advantage of 30 years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and deeper understanding of Schoenberg's aims and significance to produce a superb guide to Schoenberg's life and work. MacDonald demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg's musical language (particularly the enigmatic and influential twelve-tone method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a revolutionary composer.
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