In this book on Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109, Nicholas Marston combines source studies and a Schenkerian analytical approach to produce one of the most extensive and detailed studies of a Beethoven piano sonata ever published. The study is based on a complete transcription of all the surviving autograph musical sources: the sketches, a fragmentary Urschrift, and the autograph score. Early printed editions and manuscript copies are also discussed and the text is handsomely supported by extensive transcription from the sources. After an introductory chapter in which previous work -...

When Bela Bartok died in September of 1945, he left a partially completed viola concerto commissioned by the virtuoso violist William Primrose. Yet, while no definitive version of the work exists, this concerto has become arguably the most-performed viola concerto in the world. The story of how the concerto came to be, from its commissioning by Primrose to its first performance to the several completions that are performed today is told here in Bartok's Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of His Swansong.

After Bartok's death, his family asked the composer's friend Tibor Serly...

This book suggests ways in which Debussy's sketches and drafts may be used to explain how he composed one of his last great symphonic scores: Iberia (from mages for orchestra, 1903-10). Part 1 shows how we might understand the process of musical composition as a form of expert problem solving; Part 2 reconstructs the genesis of each of the three movements in turn.
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This is the first book-length study of the composition, reception, extramusical implications, and stylistic eclecticism of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, a staple of the nineteenth-century musical canon. Cooper devotes extensive attention to the differences between the posthumously published familiar version of the work and the composer's revision, which remained unpublished until 2001. He presents substantial new insights into a work which many listeners and scholars have known only in the version the composer considered less successful.