Bard Music Festival

Jann Pasler is professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. Her books include Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics and Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France. A revealing look at French composer and virtuoso Camille Saint-Saëns Camille Saint-Saëns-perhaps the foremost French musical figure of the late nineteenth century and a composer who wrote in nearly every musical genre, from opera and the symphony to film music-is now being rediscovered after a century of modernism overshadowed his earlier importance. In a wide-ranging and trenchant series of essays, articles, and documents, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World deconstructs the multiple realities behind the man and his music. Topics range from intimate glimpses of the private and playful Saint-Saëns, to the composer's interest in astronomy and republican politics, his performances of Mozart and Rameau over eight decades, and his extensive travels around the world. This collection also analyzes the role he played in various musical societies and his complicated relationship with such composers as Liszt, Massenet, Wagner, and Ravel. Featuring the best contemporary scholarship on this crucial, formative period in French music, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World restores the composer to his vital role as innovator and curator of Western music. The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Jean-Christophe Branger, Michel Duchesneau, Katharine Ellis, Annegret Fauser, Yves Gérard, Dana Gooley, Carolyn Guzski, Carol Hess, D. Kern Holoman, Léo Houziaux, Florence Launay, Stéphane Leteuré, Martin Marks, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, William Peterson, Michael Puri, Sabina Teller Ratner, Laure Schnapper, Marie-Gabrielle Soret, Michael Stegemann, and Michael Strasser. "This study of a versatile, tasteful and often endearing composer, and a serious, playful and sometimes prickly man, may be thoroughly recommended." "This compilation of masterful scholarship is likely to become a preeminent source for information on Saint-Saëns." "Jann Pasler's edited collection thus offers a significant contribution to Saint-Saens studies, and to the field of nineteenth- and early twentieth century French music as a whole."---Helen Abbott, French Studies "[T]his book represents [quite an] achievement. Saint-Saëns is revealed and yet remains intensely private: the book speaks volumes on the composer's life, views, working methods, and cultural and social status."---Clair Rowden, H-France Review

Marina Frolova-Walker is professor of music history at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Clare College. Her books include Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin and Stalin's Music Prize. A rare look at the life and music of renowned Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov During his lifetime, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) was a composer whose work had great influence not only in his native Russia but also internationally. While he remains well-known in Russia-where many of his fifteen operas and various orchestral pieces are still in the standard repertoire-very little of his work is performed in the West today beyond Scheherezade and arrangements of The Flight of the Bumblebee. In Western writings, he appears mainly in the context of the Mighty Handful, a group of five Russian composers to which he belonged at the outset of his career. Rimsky-Korsakov and His World finally gives the composer center stage and due attention. In this collection, Rimsky-Korsakov's major operas, The Snow Maiden, Mozart and Salieri, and The Golden Cockerel, receive multifaceted exploration and are carefully contextualized within the wider Russian culture of the era. The discussion of these operas is accompanied and enriched by the composer's letters to Nadezhda Zabela, the distinguished soprano for whom he wrote several leading roles. Other essays look at more general aspects of Rimsky-Korsakov's work and examine his far-reaching legacy as a professor of composition and orchestration, including his impact on his most famous pupil Igor Stravinsky. The contributors are Lidia Ader, Leon Botstein, Emily Frey, Marina Frolova-Walker, Adalyat Issiyeva, Simon Morrison, Anna Nisnevich, Olga Panteleeva, and Yaroslav Timofeev. The Bard Music Festival Bard Music Festival 2018 Rimsky-Korsakov and His World Bard College August 10–12 and August 17–19, 2018 "Rimskii-Korsakov and His World is to be welcomed not just for the many riches within it, but for its implicit call to continue the work of reconsidering the composer to whom it is so devoted."---Philip Ross Bullock, Slavonic and East European Review

Laurel E. Fay is an independent scholar and author of Shostakovich: A Life, which won the 2001 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. She has written and lectured extensively on Russian and Soviet music. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich. "An important contribution to the discussion on Shostakovich."

Leonora Saavedra is associate professor of music at the University of California, Riverside. Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) is the central figure in Mexican music of the twentieth century and among the most eminent of all Latin American modernist composers. An enfant terrible in his own country, Chávez was an integral part of the emerging music scene in the United States in the 1920s. His highly individual style-diatonic, dissonant, contrapuntal-addressed both modernity and Mexico's indigenous past. Chávez was also a governmental arts administrator, founder of major Mexican cultural institutions, and conductor and founder of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. Carlos Chávez and His World brings together an international roster of leading scholars to delve into not only Chávez's music but also the history, art, and politics surrounding his life and work. Contributors explore Chávez's vast body of compositions, including his piano music, symphonies, violin concerto, late compositions, and Indianist music. They look at his connections with such artistic greats as Aaron Copland, Miguel Covarrubias, Henry Cowell, Silvestre Revueltas, and Paul Strand. The essays examine New York's modernist scene, Mexican symphonic music, portraits of Chávez by major Mexican artists of the period, including Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, and Chávez's impact on El Colegio Nacional. A quantum leap in understanding Carlos Chávez and his milieu, this collection will stimulate further work in Latin American music and culture. The contributors are Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Amy Bauer, Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Helen Delpar, Christina Taylor Gibson, Susana González Aktories, Anna Indych-López, Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, James Krippner, Rebecca Levi, Ricardo Miranda, Julián Orbón, Howard Pollack, Leonora Saavedra, Antonio Saborit, Stephanie Stallings, and Luisa Vilar Payá. Bard Music Festival 2015: Carlos Chávez and His World Bard College August 7-9 and August 14-16, 2015 "An insightful volume."---William Robin, The New York Times

Christopher Hailey is the author of a biography of Franz Schreker and an editor of the German and English editions of the Berg/Schoenberg correspondence. He has published editions of scores by Berg and Schreker and is a cotranslator of Theodor Adorno's biography of Berg. An incisive new look at the pivotal modernist composer Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics. The contributors are Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley. "One of the most important and perceptive books on Berg to appear for many years."---Nicholas Baragwanath, Music and Letters "Hailey's introductory chapter is remarkable for the amount of evocative and trenchant detail he has managed to offer in a small space; it may well be the best writing about this milieu since Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna thirty years ago. . . . It is an unexpected delight that a real portrait emerges in this volume."---William R. Braun, Opera News "A valuable contribution to our understanding of Berg the man as well as to Berg the composer."

Tamara Levitz is professor of musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include Teaching New Classicality and Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone. A new look at one of the most important composers of the twentith century Stravinsky and His World brings together an international roster of scholars to explore fresh perspectives on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. Situating Stravinsky in new intellectual and musical contexts, the essays in this volume shed valuable light on one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Contributors examine Stravinsky's interaction with Spanish and Latin American modernism, rethink the stylistic label "neoclassicism" with a section on the ideological conflict over his lesser-known opera buffa Mavra, and reassess his connections to his homeland, paying special attention to Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union in 1962. The essays also explore Stravinsky's musical and religious differences with Arthur Lourié, delve into Stravinsky's collaboration with Pyotr Suvchinsky and Roland-Manuel in the genesis of his groundbreaking Poetics of Music, and look at how the movement within stasis evident in the scores of Stravinsky's Orpheus and Oedipus Rex reflected the composer's fierce belief in fate. Rare documents-including Spanish and Mexican interviews, Russian letters, articles by Arthur Lourié, and rarely seen French and Russian texts-supplement the volume, bringing to life Stravinsky's rich intellectual milieu and intense personal relationships. The contributors are Tatiana Baranova, Leon Botstein, Jonathan Cross, Valérie Dufour, Gretchen Horlacher, Tamara Levitz, Klára Móricz, Leonora Saavedra, and Svetlana Savenko. "Framed by Jonathan Cross's stylish response to the theme 'Stravinsky in exile', and Leon Botstein's thoughts on the rewards of considering the composer alongside fellow Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov, the book seeks new angles on Stravinsky and Russia in the years after 1912, and on the role of Russians . . . during Stravinsky's time in France. . . . [L]evitz herself can be unsparing in drawing a detailed, warts-and-all portrait of the great composer."---Arnold Whittall, Musical Times "Tamara Levitz's Stravinsky and his World contains some of the most unexpected and engaging discoveries of the crop of books that appeared to mark the centenary of The Rite of Spring."---Philip Ross Bullock, Slavonic and East European Review

Thomas S. Grey is professor of music at Stanford University. His books include Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts and The Cambridge Companion to Wagner. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) aimed to be more than just a composer. He set out to redefine opera as a "total work of art" combining the highest aspirations of drama, poetry, the symphony, the visual arts, even religion and philosophy. Equally celebrated and vilified in his own time, Wagner continues to provoke debate today regarding his political legacy as well as his music and aesthetic theories. Wagner and His World examines his works in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Seven original essays investigate such topics as music drama in light of rituals of naming in the composer's works and the politics of genre; the role of leitmotif in Wagner's reception; the urge for extinction in Tristan und Isolde as psychology and symbol; Wagner as his own stage director; his conflicted relationship with pianist-composer Franz Liszt; the anti-French satire Eine Kapitulation in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; and responses of Jewish writers and musicians to Wagner's anti-Semitism. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Karol Berger, Leon Botstein, Lydia Goehr, Kenneth Hamilton, Katherine Syer, and Christian Thorau. This book also includes translations of essays, reviews, and memoirs by champions and detractors of Wagner; glimpses into his domestic sphere in Tribschen and Bayreuth; and all of Wagner's program notes to his own works. Introductions and annotations are provided by the editor and David Breckbill, Mary A. Cicora, James Deaville, Annegret Fauser, Steven Huebner, David Trippett, and Nicholas Vazsonyi. "Offers much stimulating material, presented in kaleidoscopic fashion, that should be required reading for anyone desiring a more profound insight."---Della Couling, Classical Music Magazine "Grey once again has ferreted out themes and original material on the composer which have not been over-exposed in English translation."---Mike Ashman, Gramophone

Christopher H. Gibbs is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival. He is the author of The Life of Schubert. Morten Solvik is Center Director of IES Abroad Vienna, where he also teaches music history. His work includes articles on Schubert, Bruckner, and Mahler. The life, times, and music of Franz Schubert During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797–1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays and translated documents in Franz Schubert and His World examine his compositions and ties to the Viennese cultural context, revealing surprising and overlooked aspects of his music. Contributors explore Schubert's youthful participation in the Nonsense Society, his circle of friends, and changing views about the composer during his life and in the century after his death. New insights are offered about the connections between Schubert's music and the popular theater of the day, his strategies for circumventing censorship, the musical and narrative relationships linking his song settings of poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, and musical tributes he composed to commemorate the death of Beethoven just twenty months before his own. The book also includes translations of excerpts from a literary journal produced by Schubert's classmates and of Franz Liszt's essay on the opera Alfonso und Estrella. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Leon Botstein, Lisa Feurzeig, John Gingerich, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Rita Steblin. "The historical background provided by these essays often sheds light on the music. A thorough index makes this a valuable reference work as well as a good read."---Stephen Matthews, The Schubertian

Walter Frisch is the H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University. He is the author of Brahms: The Four Symphonies and Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation. Kevin C. Karnes is assistant professor of music history at Emory University. He is the author of Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna. Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the "New German School" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists. The essays are complemented by a new selection of criticism and analyses of Brahms's works published by the composer's contemporaries, documenting the ways in which Brahms's music was understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences in Europe and North America. A new selection of memoirs by Brahms's friends, students, and early admirers provides intimate glimpses into the composer's working methods and personality. And a catalog of the music, literature, and visual arts dedicated to Brahms documents the breadth of influence exerted by the composer upon his contemporaries. "Almost exactly twice as long as the original publication, this revised edition of Brahms and His World presents new perspectives on Brahms that have come to light over the past two decades. . . . A worthy replacement of its predecessor, this well-illustrated volume concludes with a catalog of books, compositions, and artworks dedicated to the composer through the end of the 19th century."

Byron Adams is professor of composition and musicology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the coeditor of Vaughan Williams Essays. Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating, important, and influential figures in the history of British music. He rose from humble beginnings and achieved fame with music that to this day is beloved by audiences in England, and his work has secured an enduring legacy worldwide. Leading scholars examine the composer's life in Edward Elgar and His World, presenting a comprehensive portrait of both the man and the age in which he lived. Elgar's achievement is remarkably varied and wide-ranging, from immensely popular works like the famous Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1--a standard feature of American graduations--to sweeping masterpieces like his great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. The contributors explore Elgar's Catholicism, which put him at odds with the prejudices of Protestant Britain; his glorification of British colonialism; his populist tendencies; his inner life as an inspired autodidact; the aristocratic London drawing rooms where his reputation was made; the class prejudice with which he contended throughout his career; and his anguished reaction to World War I. Published in conjunction with the 2007 Bard Music Festival and the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth, this elegant and thought-provoking volume illuminates the greatness of this accomplished English composer and brings vividly to life the rich panorama of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Rachel Cowgill, Sophie Fuller, Daniel M. Grimley, Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, Deborah Heckert, Charles Edward McGuire, Matthew Riley, Alison I. Shiel, and Aidan J. Thomson. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Byron Adams clearly loves Elgar and his music...[His] chapter on Elgar's self-education...is a fascinating exploration of how books read by the budding composer had an enduring influence on his music."---Daniel Jaffe, BBC Music Magazine "This fine and fascinating book includes welcome pieces by younger scholars working in the U.S. and England--recent PhDs who bring new perspectives, ideas, and methodologies to this tricky and provocative branch of socio/historical musicology. In addition to providing a clear, helpful introduction and a striking essay on the persistence of memory, Adams proves himself an inspired editor. The 13 essays--not a dud among them--look at societal, cultural, historical, and psychological aspects of Elgar's life and world."---W. Metcalfe, Choice "[A] handsome volume of essays by a dozen scholars, who strive to assess Elgar¹s place in music history."---George B. Stauffer, Weekly Standard "It is greatly to the credit of Byron Adams that, amid the plethora of Elgar material published in the last few years, Edward Elgar and His World is a vital contribution. . . . Here Adams challenges us with a rich contextual study not of Elgar's world, but of many conflicting and contradictory worlds in which the composer lived, battled, triumphed, failed, and died."---James Brooks Kuykendall, Notes "The essays in Edward Elgar and His World ambitiously and successfully delineate the complexity of Elgar's world and the composer's place in it. . . . All of the essays in . . . offer richly detailed, extensively documented, and fascinating explorations of different aspects of Elgar's world."---Dan Kline, Victorian Studies "This collection contains almost nothing that is unworthy, and several chapters that significantly advance the important recent realignments in Elgar scholarship (and, I hope, more widely). The old guard may grow their ulcers, but humanities scholarship should be grateful to Adams. Elgar's world has never been more illuminatingly painted."---J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Music and Letters

Jonathan D. Bellman is professor of music history and literature and head of academic studies in music at the University of Northern Colorado. Halina Goldberg is professor of musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, and affiliate of the Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, Slavic Languages and Literatures Department, Polish Studies Center, and Russian and East European Institute. A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk Chopin Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners. Chopin and His World reexamines Chopin and his music in light of the cultural narratives formed during his lifetime. These include the romanticism of the ailing spirit, tragically singing its death-song as life ebbs; the Polish expatriate, helpless witness to the martyrdom of his beloved homeland, exiled among friendly but uncomprehending strangers; the sorcerer-bard of dream, memory, and Gothic terror; and the pianist's pianist, shunning the appreciative crowds yet composing and improvising idealized operas, scenes, dances, and narratives in the shadow of virtuoso-idol Franz Liszt. The international Chopin scholars gathered here demonstrate the ways in which Chopin responded to and was understood to exemplify these narratives, as an artist of his own time and one who transcended it. This collection also offers recently rediscovered artistic representations of his hands (with analysis), and-for the first time in English-an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies. The contributors are Jonathan D. Bellman, Leon Botstein, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Halina Goldberg, Jeffrey Kallberg, David Kasunic, Anatole Leikin, Eric McKee, James Parakilas, John Rink, and Sandra P. Rosenblum. Contemporary documents by Karol Kurpiński, Adam Mickiewicz, and Józef Sikorski are included.

Daniel M. Grimley is university lecturer in music at the University of Oxford, tutorial fellow of Merton College, and senior lecturer in music at University College. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius and the author of Grieg and Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism. New perspectives on the greatest Finnish composer of all time Perhaps no twentieth-century composer has provoked a more varied reaction among the music-loving public than Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Originally hailed as a new Beethoven by much of the Anglo-Saxon world, he was also widely disparaged by critics more receptive to newer trends in music. At the height of his popular appeal, he was revered as the embodiment of Finnish nationalism and the apostle of a new musical naturalism. Yet he seemingly chose that moment to stop composing altogether, despite living for three more decades. Providing wide cultural contexts, contesting received ideas about modernism, and interrogating notions of landscape and nature, Jean Sibelius and His World sheds new light on the critical position occupied by Sibelius in the Western musical tradition. The essays in the book explore such varied themes as the impact of Russian musical traditions on Sibelius, his compositional process, Sibelius and the theater, his understanding of music as a fluid and improvised creation, his critical reception in Great Britain and America, his "late style" in the incidental music for The Tempest, and the parallel contemporary careers of Sibelius and Richard Strauss. Documents include the draft of Sibelius's 1896 lecture on folk music, selections from a roman à clef about his student circle in Berlin at the turn of the century, Theodor Adorno's brief but controversial tirade against the composer, and the newspaper debates about the Sibelius monument unveiled in Helsinki a decade after the composer's death. The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Philip Ross Bullock, Glenda Dawn Goss, Daniel Grimley, Jeffrey Kallberg, Tomi Mäkelä, Sarah Menin, Max Paddison, and Timo Virtanen. "The connection between Sibelius and the Russian tradition--an influence that went in both directions--is the subject of an excellent essay by Philip Ross Bullock in the book accompanying the festival, Jean Sibelius and His World, from Princeton University Press."---Zachary Woolfe, New York Times "As this collection shows, there is a resurgence of interest in the music of Jean Sibelius. . . . [T]he book is full of useful information." "Jean Sibelius and His World ends with English translations of a number of important primary documents. . . . Perhaps the most important document is Theodor Adorno's critique 'Goss on Sibelius.' I have read about these documents in many Sibelius essays, here and elsewhere, so we owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Grimley for making them available in translation. This book represents the high level of current Sibelius scholarship and should be a welcome addition to academic music libraries."---Carl Rafikonen, Notes "[T]his is a fine collection of essays that advances Sibelius research significantly. It bears the title Sibelius and his World, but it also does an excellent job of alerting the reader to Sibelius's relevance to our world."---Derek B. Scott, Music and Letters

Arman Schwartz is a Birmingham Fellow in Music at the University of Birmingham and a member of the editorial board of Opera Quarterly. Emanuele Senici is professor of music history at the University of Rome la Sapienza and a former editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini's operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection's essays explore Puccini's engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer's place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini's orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini's interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca's notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson. "The collection is an amazing potpourri of Puccini scholarship."

Daniel Goldmark is professor of music and director of the Center for Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University. His books include Tunes for 'Toons. Kevin C. Karnes is professor of music at Emory University. His books include Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa." A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, Korngold and His World provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. This collection examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. The volume also features numerous historical documents-many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations-including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold. The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans. Bard Music Festival 2019 Korngold and His World Bard College August 9–11 and 16–18, 2019

Peter Laki is a musicologist serving as program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra. Béla Bartók, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartók was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary. Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartók in a large historical and cultural context. László Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartók's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallián surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Béla Balázs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky. Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartók's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartók's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality. "Adds important material to the slim library of English-language studies of Bartók's achievements."

Scott Burnham is Professor of Music at Princeton University and the author of Beethoven Hero(Princeton). Michael P. Steinberg is Professor of History at Cornell University and associate editor of The Music Quarterly. He is the author of The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival. Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him. The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality, memory, and voice in works at the threshold of Beethoven's late style, such as An die Ferne Geliebte, the Cello Sonata op. 102, no. 1, and the somewhat later Piano Sonata op. 109. Peering behind the scenes into Beethoven's workshop, Tilman Skowroneck explains how the young Beethoven chose his pianos, and William Kinderman shows Beethoven in the process of sketching and revising his compositions. The volume concludes with four essays engaging the broader question of reception of Beethoven's impact on his world and ours. Christopher Gibbs' study of Beethoven's funeral and its aftermath features documentary material appearing in English for the first time; art historian Alessandra Comini offers an illustrated discussion of Beethoven's ubiquitous and iconic frown; Sanna Pederson takes up the theme of masculinity in critical representations of Beethoven; and Leon Botstein examines the aesthetics and politics of hearing extramusical narratives and plots in Beethoven's music. Bringing together varied and fresh approaches to the West's most celebrated composer, this collection of essays provides music lovers with an enriched understanding of Beethoven--as man, musician, and phenomenon. "Shows a remarkable variety of current academic concerns having to do with Beethoven. . . . Filled with other interesting and delightful tidbits. . ."---James R. Oestreich, The New York Times

Karen Painter is Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Berlin Prize and a Humboldt fellowship in Berlin. From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's life and work. But they have focused on analysis internal to the compositions, along with their programmatic contexts. In this volume, musicologists and historians turn outward to examine the broader political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music. Peter Franklin takes up questions of gender, Talia Pecker Berio examines the composer's Jewish identity, and Thomas Peattie, Charles S. Maier, and Karen Painter consider, respectively, contemporary theories of memory, the theatricality of Mahler's art and fin-de-siècle politics, and the impinging confrontation with mass society. The private world of Gustav Mahler, in his songs and late works, is explored by leading Austrian musicologist Peter Revers and a German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling. Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival. "The best thing in the [Bard Music] festival could have been enjoyed in the cool quiet of one's study: Ms. Painter's book. . . . The highlight is Mr. Botstein's own essay, a typically virtuosic riff on Theodor W. Adorno's book on Mahler. . . . But the book's other essays--on performance in late-19th-century Central Europe as a political statement on Mahle''s Jewishness, on gender issues and Ms. Painter's own discussion of the mass public gestures in Mahler's big works (especially the 'Symphony of a Thousand) and their connection to socialist cultural policy--are all worth reading. As are the musical analyses and the period reviews."---John Rockwell, The New York Times' "[A] valuable addition to the Mahler library."

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and Artistic Co-Director of the Bard Music Festival. He is the author of The Life of Schubert and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert. Dana Gooley is Assistant Professor of Music History at Case Western Reserve University and the author of The Virtuoso Liszt. No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism. The essays brought together in Franz Liszt and His World advance our understanding of the composer with fresh perspectives and an emphasis on historical contexts. Rainer Kleinertz examines Wagner's enthusiasm for Liszt's symphonic poem Orpheus; Christopher Gibbs discusses Liszt's pathbreaking Viennese concerts of 1838; Dana Gooley assesses Liszt against the backdrop of antivirtuosity polemics; Ryan Minor investigates two cantatas written in honor of Beethoven; Anna Celenza offers new insights about Liszt's experience of Italy; Susan Youens shows how Liszt's songs engage with the modernity of Heinrich Heine's poems; James Deaville looks at how publishers sustained Liszt's popularity; and Leon Botstein explores Liszt's role in the transformation of nineteenth-century preoccupations regarding religion, the nation, and art. Franz Liszt and His World also includes key biographical and critical documents from Liszt's lifetime, which open new windows on how Liszt was viewed by his contemporaries and how he wished to be viewed by posterity. Introductions to and commentaries on these documents are provided by Peter Bloom, José Bowen, James Deaville, Allan Keiler, Rainer Kleinertz, Ralph Locke, Rena Charnin Mueller, and Benjamin Walton. "The book is eminently successful, not least because of Leon Botstein's magisterial concluding essay, which is perhaps the best summary of the composer's cultural legacy to have appeared in English. . . . Apparently Liszt, of all 19th-century composers, is served particularly well by the collection format--perhaps due to the remarkable range of his activities." "This valuable compendium of essays...seeks to explain Liszt's extravagant and sweeping musical presence in Europe within a broader historical context...A compassionately put together tome, its modestly-priced 587 pages are more than deserving of a place in the Liszt fan's bookcase."---Mark Tanner, Classical Music Magazine "This volume is by far the most invigorating and useful anthology of Liszt studies in print."---David Trippett, MLA Notes

J. Peter Burkholder is Professor of Music and Associate Dean of the Faculties at Indiana University. He is the author or editor of three other books on Ives and is president of the Charles Ives Society. This volume shows Charles Ives in the context of his world in a number of revealing ways. Five new essays examine Ives's relationships to European music and to American music, politics, business, and landscape. J. Peter Burkholder shows Ives as a composer well versed in four distinctive musical traditions who blended them in his mature music. Leon Botstein explores the paradox of how, in the works of Ives and Mahler, musical modernism emerges from profoundly antimodern sensibilities. David Michael Hertz reveals unsuspected parallels between one of Ives's most famous pieces, the Concord Piano Sonata, and the piano sonatas of Liszt and Scriabin. Michael Broyles sheds new light on Ives's political orientation and on his career in the insurance business, and Mark Tucker shows the importance for Ives of his vacations in the Adirondacks and the representation of that landscape in his music. The remainder of the book presents documents that illuminate Ives's personal life. A selection of some sixty letters to and from Ives and his family, edited and annotated by Tom C. Owens, is the first substantial collection of Ives correspondence to be published. Two sections of reviews and longer profiles published during his lifetime highlight the important stages in the reception of Ives's music, from his early works through the premieres of his most important compositions to his elevation as an almost mythic figure with a reputation among some critics as America's greatest composer. "This book helps us to see why Charles Ives remains such a puzzle. The distinguished Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder has assembled an insightful four-part study [that] . . . illuminate[s] the shifting history of Ives's place in American culture--and provide[s] therefore, important historical illuminations of its own."