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Christmas Gift Ideas - Books on Classical Composers
For this first instalment of our gift guides we have selected a range of books published this year about Classical composers. Ranging from paperback reissues of biographies of Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Schumann, to new publications focusing on the Bach Cello Suites, songs by Hugo Wolf, Rossini's Barber of Seville, and the works of Stephen Sondheim, hopefully you will find the perfect present for music-loving family members and friends!
Bach's six Cello Suites are among the most cherished of all works in the classical music literature. Shrouded in mystery - they were largely unknown for some two hundred years after their composition - they have acquired a magical aura which continues to attract and fascinate audiences the world over. By offering his own very personal observations of the music, award-winning cellist Steven Isserlis's aim is to take the reader further into the world of the suites in order to enhance the experience of hearing some of the greatest works ever composed.
Available Format: Book
The winner of the 2020 Presto Book Award for Best Composer Biography is now available in paperback. Each chapter focuses on a period of Beethoven's life, a piece of music, and a revealing theme, from family to friends, from heroism to liberty, transforming how we listen to his works. It provides a compelling, human portrayal of Beethoven and a fascinating journey into one of the world's most amazing creative minds.
Available Format: Book
Alban Berg, one of the most prominent composers of the Second Viennese School, is counted among the pioneers of twelve-tone serialism. This new study delivers a fresh perspective formed from a comprehensive study of primary sources that reveal the forces that shaped Berg's personality, career, and artistic outlook. Furthermore, it presents insightful analysis of all of Berg's major works, bringing into play Berg's own analyses of his music, many of which have not been considered in existing scholarship.
Available Format: Book
Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins stand as giants of the musical theatre world, but it was ballet that launched their stage careers and established their relationship, with Fancy Free (1944) and the now largely-forgotten Facsimile (1946). Drawing on previously unpublished archival documents, this book provides a detailed and original account of the creation, premiere, and reception of these two works.
Available Format: Book
What were the forces that brought Carmen to the operatic stage? This book explores how Andalusian stereotypes, such as gypsy spectacle, banditry and the fiestas of the bullfight, contributed to the success of Bizet's opera. The original staging is used to examine both places and characters, in particular realities and mythologies about gypsies in the nineteenth century. It concludes with the ways in which the opera first reached the stage, both in terms of its scenography and how it was sung, played and acted.
Available Format: Book
Now available in paperback, this collection of essays opens with topics including Brahms's Hamburg childhood, his move to Vienna and his rich social life, and also considers professional matters from finance to publishing and copyright, the musicians who shaped his works, and the musical styles that influenced him. It closes with chapters on reception, recordings, historical performance, and his compositional legacy.
Available Format: Book
Conductor and pianist Steuart Bedford (1939-2021) could not remember a time when he did not know Benjamin Britten. His mother sang with the English Opera Group in the premieres of The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring in the late 1940s, and the whole family was closely involved with Britten and Peter Pears for many years. This book is a vivid and insightful account of his long association with both Britten the man and his music.
Available Format: Book
Based on ten years of research and a vast cache of primary sources this monumental book, now available in paperback, is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English. It sets out to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin, with particular focus on his childhood and youth in Poland, and his romantic life with George Sand, with whom he lived for nine years.
Available Format: Book
This collection brings together more than 1600 letters from and to Gerald Finzi, spanning the composer's life from the early 1920s until his death in 1956. His more than 160 correspondents include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Edmund Rubbra, Arthur Bliss, Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten and Sir John Barbirolli, making this a portrait not only of Gerald Finzi but also of his group of friends that impacted British musical life in the first half of the twentieth century.
Available Format: Book
Fanny Hensel created some of the most imaginative and original music of her era, making her arguably the most gifted female composer of the nineteenth century. In eleven new essays, leading scholars consider Hensel's songs from a wide range of angles, covering topics such as her fascination with particular poets and poetic themes; her innovative harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textual strategies; and her connection to larger literary and musical trends.
Available Format: Book
The world premiere in Munich of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in the summer of 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his adult life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings, to tumultuous applause. Now available in paperback, this book recounts its far-reaching effect on composers, conductors and writers, and re-assesses Mahler's thoughts in relation to the artistic and intellectual movements of the time.
Available Format: Book
This study of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British music to have been without one. Written with the benefit of access to previously unknown or unresearched archives, it presents a thorough examination and analysis of the life and work of a musician who may reasonably be asserted as having been unique in British music history.
Available Format: Book
From acclaimed biographer Jan Swafford comes a new paperback edition of the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The book is both wide-ranging and intimate in its exploration of a genius in his life and his setting: a man who rose from a particular time and place, whose art would enrich the world for centuries to come, who would immeasurably shape the future of classical music, who from his age to ours has stood as the definition of a prodigy.
Available Format: Book
In this new edition of his comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart - blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living.
Available Format: Book
Drawing on a wealth of unexplored documentation, this biography reappraises a central figure in twentieth-century Russian culture. It depicts the composer and his milieu against the backdrop of turbulent times, examining his involvement with Soviet musical institutions and his relationships with Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and other notable musicians. It also brings into focus the distinctive nature of Myaskovsky's creative achievement and affirms his stature as a leading symphonist of the era.
Available Format: Book
Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion
Jessie Fillerup; University of California Press; Hardback
Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. This book examines his music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, it develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his music and other forms of aesthetic illusion.
Available Format: Book
This book surveys the opera's fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted. It closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded and commodified glory.
Available Format: Book
Now available in paperback, this is a groundbreaking account of a major composer whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy ever since his attempted suicide and early death in an insane asylum. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, it sheds new light on Schumann's life and music, his sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the true facts behind his courtship of his wife Clara and the opposition of her monstrous father, and the ways in which the crises of his life, his dreams and fantasies, entered his music.
Available Format: Book
Always more than simply a Finnish national figure, Sibelius's life spanned tumultuous events. This book situates him within a rich interdisciplinary environment, paying attention to his relationship with architecture, literature, politics and the visual arts. Drawing on the latest developments in Sibelius research, it is intended as an accessible and rewarding introduction for the general reader, and also offers a fresh and provocative interpretation for those more familiar with his music.
Available Format: Book
This is the first reference volume devoted to the works of this prolific composer and lyricist, who sadly died in November 2021. The encyclopedia's entries provide readers with detailed information about Sondheim's work and key figures in his career, including all of his major works such as Assassins, Company, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gypsy, Into the Woods, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and more.
Available Format: Book
The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia
Edward Campbell & Peter O'Hagan (editors); Cambridge University Press; Hardback
Igor Stravinsky is one of a small number of early modernist composers whose music epitomises the stylistic crisis of twentieth-century music. With entries written by more than fifty international contributors from Russian, European and American traditions, this encyclopedia presents multiple perspectives on the life, works, writings, and aesthetic relationships of this multi-faceted creative artist.
Available Format: Book
This book charts the life of perhaps the best loved and most widely performed British composer in history. While Arthur Sullivan is best known for his comic opera collaborations with W. S. Gilbert, it was his substantial corpus of sacred music which meant most to him and for which he wanted to be remembered. Focusing on the spiritual aspects of Sullivan's life, it uses hitherto undiscovered letters, diary entries, and other sources to reveal the important influences on his faith and his work.
Available Format: Book
Now in paperback, this book from the author of The Rest Is Noise reveals how Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics. With a narrative ranging from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, and from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now, it explores what it means to be a Wagnerian. Neither apologia nor condemnation, it is a work of intellectual passion, urging us towards a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
Available Format: Book
More than any other of Wagner's works, Parsifal expresses a depth of feeling in music for which we do not have words. Now available in paperback, this short but penetrating book is an insightful and moving exploration of Wagner's last opera, which shows how Wagner achieved and executed his most profound work, explaining the story, its musical ideas, and their coming together into a sublime whole, giving us the musical equivalent of forgiveness and closure.
Available Format: Book
This book gathers together for the first time every poem Wolf set to music. Alongside the original German texts are translations by Lieder expert Richard Stokes, who also provides illuminating commentary. The thirty-six poets set by Wolf are each given their own chapter: a brief essay on the poet is followed by a note on Wolf's connection with the writer, extracts from letters that throw light on the songs and convey his mood at the time of composition, and the texts and translations.
Available Format: Book
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