Descriptive Piano Fantasias

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The Battle of Prague (ca. 1788), František Kocžwara
La mort de Louis Seize (1794), F. D. Mouchy
La journée d’Ulm (1805), Daniel Steibelt
Battle of Waterloo (1820), Neville Butler Challoner
Grande fantaisie lugubre an souvenir des trois héros: Prince Joseph Poniatowski, Ko?ciuszko, et D?browski, Op. 18, No. 1 (1821), Václav Vilém Würfel
La bataille de Grochow et Praga (1831), Ludwik Gli?ski
Une promenade sur le Nil (1833), Félicien David
Une messe de minuit à Rome (1841), Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély
Le violon de Crémone (1847), Juliette Godillon
Le baptême de la poupée, Op. 114 (ca. 1886), Joseph Delafosse
The Johnstown Flood (1889), Alberto Rivieri
The Kishineff Massacre (1904), Herman S. Shapiro
The Earthquake in San Francisco and the Destruction of the City of the Golden West, on the 18th of April 1906 (1906), Prof. C. H. Stockman
Koncert nad koncertami (ca. 1910), Marjan Signio

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The works in this volume, chosen to reflect the breadth of narrative and characteristic piano music, illuminate certain largely forgotten musical histories. The highly popular genre of the descriptive piano fantasia, conceived and produced for the musical tastes and technical capabilities of amateur pianists, grew out of eighteenth-century narrative works such as Johann Kuhnau’s “Biblical Sonatas” (1700) and the anonymous Battle of Rosbach (ca. 1780). Starting with František Kocžwara’s Battle of Prague (ca. 1788) and continuing chronologically through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, these works help to contextualize nineteenth-century aesthetic debates of descriptive versus idealistic music (and later programmatic versus absolute music), and the partisanship they engendered, by demonstrating the ubiquity of this repertoire throughout Europe and the United States. Such fantasias reflected cultural preoccupations, based as they often were on historical or fictional events, and were particularly important in Poland, where national upheaval and political marginalization provided fertile ground for musical representation and catharsis. The descriptive fantasias cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by such composers as Fryderyk Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms, and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.

ISBN: 9781987206098 (1987206096)

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