Music: Classical

In this, the fourth volume in the Norton Introduction to Music History series, Philip Downs traces the rise and decline of the "Classical" style from the birth of Haydn (1732) to the death of Beethoven (1827).
He demonstrates the enormous diversity and constant change that characterized every aspect of music during this period. By dividing his text into twenty-year spans, Downs is able to trace the development of musical style. Within each span he looks at the social conditions and daily life of the musician, and the aesthetics and audience preferences in structures, performing combinations and styles. The lesser composers, or Kleinmeister, are observed, since they are the most accurate mirrors of their times. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven receive full biographical scrutiny at each stage of their development. Copious music examples and abundant illustrations are also provided.

Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured.

In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric's role in eighteenth-century culture.

This Companion provides an accessible introduction to the musical work and cultural world of Joseph Haydn. Contributors provide chapters on Haydn and his contemporaries, his working environments, and his aesthetics. Chapters on the reception of his music explore keyboard performance practices, Haydn's posthumous reputation, recorded performances and images of his symphonies, and revivals of his operas. The book surveys the major genres in which Haydn wrote, including symphonies, string quartets, keyboard sonatas and trios, liturgical music, oratorios, miscellaneous vocal genres, and the lesser known operas composed for Eszterháza and London.

This portrait traces the life of the influential composer through the royal courts, chapels, and concert halls of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland and examines his works and a large number of newly authenticated compositions.

Remarkable new study...Its central submission, that we have hitherto disregarded or misinterpreted the most profound intuitions of a unique composer, certainly carries conviction. And even after one reading there are already musical passages that this Schubert enthusiast finds himself hearing in quite a new way. Bayan Northcott, BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE The old stereotypes of Schubert as Bohemian artist and unselfconscious creator have been replaced over the past half-century with a picture of a difficult man in difficult times. The author aims to redress the balance, concentrating firstly on works where Schubert's beliefs are clearly expressed (masses, other religious music, songs amounting to Geistliche Lieder). This also prompts an examination of instrumental masterpieces (Unfinished and Great C Major Symphonies, and the Wanderer Fantasy), which show that Schubert's religious side encompasses awe and terror as well as wonder. Schubert's 'complete voice' is thus clearly heard, rather than the sombre one currently emphasised in both literature and concert. LEO BLACK is a former BBC chief producer for music.

This volume explores the culture in which the composer Franz Schubert lived and worked, and provides a basic outline of his life examined in relation to the most persistent myths and legends. Schubert's music is then explored according to genre, a chapter on his songs, another on his symphonies, and so forth. The final section looks at the reception of Schubert's music, primarily during the nineteenth century, and considers the performance tradition of his music.

The purpose of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music is to promote the study and performance of music of the eighteenth century. The Society provides a forum where scholars and performers can further their knowledge of music, history and interrelated arts of the period and serves as a resource to facilitate and encourage collaboration.

In this interpretation of the composer's life and works, Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood interweaves the composer's musical and biographical dimensions and places them in their historical and artistic contexts. Written for the lay reader, this book explores the special problems that Beethoven faced as an artist who fulfilled his destiny as Mozart's sucessor while remaining a true, rebellious original. It uncovers the artistic challenges that Beethoven set for himself and shows how they were fulfilled in his compositions. In this way, Lockwood develops a new interpretation of the composer's character that puts to rest the "heroic" model as the only basis for understanding Beethoven's career. While taking the latest scholarship fully into account, Lockwood presents the reader with a portrait of the composer that is based principally on his artistic achievements.

n this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two ground breaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart'sDon Giovanni,the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger's case studies range widely to include Monteverdi and Beethoven. His singular contribution is to expand the argument by looking into the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period. The result, as described in the preface, is the eloquent "story of the emergence of human autonomy and the resulting transformation in the fundamental experience and understanding of how time is shaped."

Associated through descriptive texts with literature, politics, religion, and other subjects, 'characteristic' symphonies offer an opportunity to study instrumental music as it engages important social and political debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social contexts by focusing on the musical representation of feeling, human physical movement, and the passage of time. The works discussed include Beethoven's Pastoral and Eroica Symphonies, Haydn's Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf's symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and orchestral battle reenactments of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. A separate chapter details the aesthetic context within which characteristic symphonies were conceived, as well as their subsequent reception, and a series of appendixes summarizes bibliographic information for over 225 relevant examples.

Alan Tyson is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a leading authority on composers and music of the Classical period, especially Mozart and Beethoven. He has made a greater contribution to the dating of sketches and compositionsthan any other scholar. His international reputation stems from his outstanding contribution to the dating and cataloguing of these composers' sketches, manuscript compositions, and early printed editions. This collection of 19 essays in his honour comprises scholarly contributions from an international group of distinguished musicologists under the editorship of Sieghard Brandenburg. The book also includes a complete checklist of Alan Tyson's writings on music.

This is essentially a reprint of Rosen's National Book Award winning volume (CH, May'73). The author has added a new chapter, "Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of His Childhood," a new preface in which he responds to the various criticisms the book has garnered over the past quarter century, and a compact disc of his performances of Beethoven's Opp. 106 and 110 piano sonatas. The new chapters, a fascinating examination of Beethoven's retention of conventional compositional procedures in the midst of the innovations of his later years, provides a completely new perspective on his stylistic development and should be the source of much debate among musicologists in years to come. This remains simply the most important book on the classical style in music. Every library and serious student of music should own a copy of this expanded edition.

Counter The Cambridge Companion to Mozart paints a rounded yet focussed picture of one of the most revered artists of all time. Bringing the most recent scholarship into the public arena, this volume bridges the gap between scholarly and popular images of the composer, enhancing the readers' appreciation of Mozart and his extraordinary output, regardless of their prior knowledge of the music. Part I situates Mozart in the context of late eighteenth-century musical environments and aesthetic trends that played a pivotal role in his artistic development and examines his methods of composition. Part II surveys Mozart's works in all of the genres in which he excelled and Part III looks at the reception of the composer and his music since his death. Part IV offers insight into Mozart's career as a performer as well as theoretical and practical perspectives on historically informed performances of his music.

This major work, the result of years of careful study and analysis, places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe. The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.