Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791 PDF Download

Author: Christoph Wolff
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393084108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner A fresh look at the life of Mozart during his imperial years by one of the world's leading Mozart scholars. "I now stand at the gateway to my fortune," Mozart wrote in a letter of 1790. He had entered into the service of Emperor Joseph II of Austria two years earlier as Imperial-Royal Chamber Composer—a salaried appointment with a distinguished title and few obligations. His extraordinary subsequent output, beginning with the three final great symphonies from the summer of 1788, invites a reassessment of this entire period of his life. Readers will gain a new appreciation and understanding of the composer's works from that time without the usual emphasis on his imminent death. The author discusses the major biographical and musical implications of the royal appointment and explores Mozart's "imperial style" on the basis of his major compositions—keyboard,chamber, orchestral, operatic, and sacred—and focuses on the large, unfamiliar works he left incomplete. This new perspective points to an energetic, fresh beginning for the composer and a promising creative and financial future.

Author: Simon P. Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108394108
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Mozart's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781–1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's professional persona and his modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians, audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic practices and traditions. Giving particular prominence to primary sources, Simon P. Keefe offers new biographical and critical perspectives on the man and his music, highlighting his extraordinary ability to engage with the competing demands of singers and instrumentalists, publishing and public performance, and concerts and dramatic productions in the course of a hectic, diverse and financially uncertain freelance career. This comprehensive and accessible volume is essential for Mozart lovers and scholars alike, exploring his Viennese masterpieces and the people and environments that shaped them.

Author: Allen Scott
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.

Author: Steffen Lösel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000598624
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart’s late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book’s thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera’s advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart’s operatic work.

Author: Simon P. Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316850838
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.

Author: Jessica Waldoff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426891
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A comprehensive, up-to-date, resource providing an essential framework for understanding Mozart's most-performed opera and its extraordinary afterlife.

Author: Austin Glatthorn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009079948
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Packed full of new archival evidence that reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the 'Classical era', this interdisciplinary study investigates key locations, genres, music, and musicians. Austin Glatthorn explores the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. He maps an extensive network of Central European theatres; reconstructs the repertoire they shared; and explores how print media, personal correspondence, and their dissemination shaped and regulated this music. He then investigates the development of German melodrama and examines how articulations of the Holy Roman Empire on the musical stage expressed imperial belonging. Glatthorn engages with the most recent historical interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire and offers quantitative, empirical analysis of repertoire supported by conventional close readings to illustrate a shared culture of music theatre that transcended traditional boundaries in music scholarship.

Author: Dorian Bandy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226828565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An innovative study of the ways performance influenced Mozart’s compositional style. We know Mozart as one of history’s greatest composers. But his contemporaries revered him as a multi-instrumentalist, a dazzling improviser, and the foremost keyboard virtuoso of his time. When he composed, it was often with a single aim in mind: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. He wrote piano concertos not with an eye to posterity but to give himself a repertoire with which to flaunt his keyboard wizardry before an awestruck public. The same was true of his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and operas, all of which were painstakingly crafted to produce specific effects on those who played or heard them, amusing, stirring, and ravishing colleagues and consumers alike. Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart’s musicianship. Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart’s style, showing through detailed analysis and imaginative historical investigation how he conceived his works as a series of dramatic scripts. Mozart the Performer is a book for anyone who wishes to engage more deeply with Mozart’s artistry and legacy and understand why, centuries later, his music still captivates us.

Author: Solomon Volkov
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307427722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
“Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

Author: SimonP. Keefe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351557912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
This volume of essays on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reflects scholarly advances made over the last thirty years. The studies are broad and focused, demonstrating a large number of viewpoints, methodologies and orientations and the material spans a wide range of subject areas, including biography, vocal music, instrumental music and performance. Written by leading researchers from Europe and North America, these previously published articles and book chapters are representative of both the most frequently discussed and debated issues in Mozart studies and the challenging, exciting nature of Mozart scholarship in general. The volume is essential reading for researchers, students and scholars of Mozart's music.