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Every year, Johann Sebastian Bach’s major vocal works are performed to mark liturgical milestones in the Christian calendar. Written by a renowned Bach scholar, this book provides an introduction to the music and cultural contexts of the composer’s most beloved masterpieces, including the Magnificat, Christmas Oratorio, and St John Passion. In addition to providing historical information, each chapter highlights significant aspects—such as the theology of love—of a particular piece. This book is the first to treat the vocal works as a whole, showing how the compositions were embedded in their original performative context within the liturgy as well as discussing Bach’s musical style, from the detailed level of individual movements to the overarching aspects of each work. The book will appeal to casual concertgoers and scholars alike.

This biography of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) presents a new view of the innovative Hungarian musician. The book traces Bartók's international career as an ardent ethno-musicologist and composer, teacher, and pianist, while also providing a detailed discussion of most of his works. Further, it explores how Europe's political and cultural tumult affected Bartók's work, travel, and reluctant emigration to the safety of America in his final years. The book illuminates Barték's personal life and relationships, while also expanding what is known about the influence of other musicians. It also looks closely at some of the composer's actions and behaviours which may have been manifestations of Asperger syndrome. The book, in short, is a consummate biography of an internationally admired musician.

Bruno Walter, one of the greatest conductors in the twentieth century, lived a fascinating life in difficult times. This book starts by describing Walter's early years in Germany, where his successes in provincial theaters led to positions at the Berlin State Opera and the Vienna State Opera. It then tells of his decade-long term as Bavarian music director and his romantic involvement with the soprano Delia Reinhardt; his other positions in the musical community until he was ousted from Germany when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933; and his return to Vienna, where he was artistic director of the Opera House until he was again forced out by the Nazis. Finally it examines his career in the United States, where he led the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras and in his last years made numerous recordings with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble created especially for him. The book makes use of the thousands of unpublished letters in the Bruno Walter Papers, now in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

This book is about composer biographies in the likes of Amadeus, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Swanee River, and Rhapsody in Blue. Even before movies had sound, filmmakers dramatized the lives of composers. Movie biographies—or biopics—have depicted composers as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin. This book surveys different styles and periods from the Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s to the international cinema of today, exploring the role that film biographies play in our understanding of history and culture. It delves into such questions as: How historically accurate are composer biopics? How and why have inaccuracies and distortions been perpetrated? What strategies have been used to represent visually the creative process? The book examines the films in several contexts and considers their role in commodifying and popularizing music.

Kay Swift (1897–1993) was one of the few women composers active on Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Best known as George Gershwin's assistant, musical adviser, and intimate friend, Swift was in fact an accomplished musician herself, a pianist and composer whose Fine and Dandy (1930) was the first complete Broadway musical written by a woman. This book discusses her music and her extraordinary life. The book describes Swift's work for musical theater, the ballet, Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes, and commercial shows. It also tells how Swift served as director of light music for the 1939 World's Fair, eloped with a cowboy from the rodeo at the fair, and abandoned her native New York for Oregon, later fashioning her experiences into an autobiographical novel, Who Could Ask for Anything More? Informed by rich material, including Swift's unpublished memoirs and extensive interviews with her family members and friends, this book captures the essence and spirit of a remarkable woman.

This book gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. It discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. The book discusses Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, this book demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich, and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile, and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. The author looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge such as Britain and the United States, and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.

French opera is second only to Italian opera in the length, breadth, and diversity of its history. Yet most people, if asked to come up with titles, could mention only a handful—Carmen, Faust, Pelleas et Melisande, Samson et Dalila—a small list for an operatic tradition that began in the seventeenth century and is still very much alive. This book provides a full, single-volume account of opera in France from its origins to the present day. It looks at the leading composers, from Lully to Messiaen and beyond; at the development of French operatic form and style; at performance, performers, and audience; and at the impact of French opera beyond France's borders.

Maya Plisetskaya, one of the world's foremost dancers, rose to become a prima ballerina of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet after an early life filled with tragedy and loss. In this memoir, Plisetskaya reflects on her personal and professional odyssey, presenting a unique view of the life of a Soviet artist during the troubled period from the late 1930s to the 1990s. Plisetskaya recounts the execution of her father in the Great Terror and her mother's exile to the Gulag. She describes her admission to the Bolshoi in 1943, the roles she performed there, and the endless petty harassments she endured, from both envious colleagues and Party officials. Refused permission for six years to tour with the company, Plisetskaya eventually performed all over the world, working with such noted choreographers as Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. She recounts the tumultuous events she lived through and the fascinating people she met—among them the legendary ballet teacher Agrippina Vaganova, George Balanchine, Frank Sinatra, Rudolf Nureyev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. She also provides fascinating details about testy cocktail-party encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, tours abroad when her meager per diem allowance brought her close to starvation, and KGB plots to capitalize on her friendship with Robert Kennedy.

This book offers a comprehensive look at musical representations of native America from the pre-colonial past through the American West and up to the present. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, from the ballets of Lully in the court of Louis XIV to popular ballads of the nineteenth century; from eighteenth-century British-American theater to the musical theater of Irving Berlin; from chamber music by Dvôrák to film music for Apaches in Hollywood Westerns. The book demonstrates how European colonists and their descendants were fascinated by the idea of race and ethnicity in music, and it examines how music contributed to the complex process of cultural mediation. The book reveals how certain themes and metaphors changed over the centuries and shows how much of this “Indian music”, which was and continues to be largely imagined, alternately idealized and vilified the peoples of native America.

This anthology of jazz criticism casts a wide net. Discussing nearly seventy major jazz figures and many of the genre's key stylistic developments, the book sees jazz as a unique perpetual narrative—one in which musicians, their audiences, and the evolving music itself are intimately intertwined. Because jazz arose from the collision of specific peoples under particular conditions, it says, its development has been unusually immediate, visible, and intense. The book reacts to and judges the music in a similarly active, attentive, and personal manner. The book contains chapters that analyze the supposed return to tradition that the music of Wynton Marsalis has come to exemplify; provide accounts of the careers of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, and Lennie Tristano; and explore jazz's relationship to American popular song and examine the jazz musician's role as actual and would-be social rebel.

This book tells the full story of Jerry Herman's life and career, from his early work in cabaret to his recent compositions for stage, screen, and television. It draws on extensive open-ended interviews with Jerry Herman as well as with scores of his theatrical colleagues, collaborators, and close friends. The resulting book—which sheds new light on each of his musicals and their scores—abounds in anecdotes and behind-the-scenes details about the world of musical theater. Readers will find a sharply drawn portrait of Herman's private life and his creative talents. The author's insights into Herman's music and lyrics, including voluminous examples from each of his musicals, are as instructive as they are edifying and entertaining.

Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as “like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this biography examines a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.

This book offers a provocative revision of the history of early jazz by focusing on two of its most notable practitioners—Whiteman, legendary in his day, and Armstrong, a legend ever since. Paul Whiteman's fame was unmatched throughout the twenties. Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, and Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey honed their craft on his bandstand. Celebrated as the “King of Jazz” in 1930 in a Universal Studios feature film, Whiteman's imperium has declined considerably since. The legend of Louis Armstrong, in contrast, grows ever more lustrous: for decades it has been Armstrong, not Whiteman, who has worn the king's crown. This dual biography explores these diverging legacies in the context of race, commerce, and the history of early jazz. Early jazz was not a story of black innovators and white usurpers. In this book, a much richer, more complicated story emerges—a story of cross-influences, sidemen, and sundry movers and shakers who were all part of a collective experience that transcended the category of race. In the world of early jazz, the book contends, kingdoms had no borders.

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. This book considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself. It starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. The book investigates the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music—classical, popular, and jazz—and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, it shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture, and about the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.

Drawing on a mass of unpublished writings and archival sources from prerevolutionary Russian conservatories, this book offers an account of the Jewish search for a modern identity in Russia through music, rather than politics or religion.

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and is today performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. This book offers a fully documented history of the making of this celebrated American musical, drawing on research from rare theater archives, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources to record every step in its development. It is filled with details about how Rodgers and Hammerstein first came together, the casting process, how Agnes de Mille became the show's choreographer, and the drafts and revisions that ultimately gave the musical its final shape. The author shows the lofty aspirations of both the creators and producers, and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, demonstrating just what made it part of its times.

In his Beat-like jaunt through the Parisian and European jazz scene, the author of this book is not unlike Jack Kerouac, Mezz Mezzrow, or Hunter S. Thompson—writers to whom, for different reasons, he owes some allegiance. What makes him special is his devotion to the troubled musicians he idolizes, and a passion for music that is blessedly contagious. Many jazz fans will know the author for his witty, irreverent, and undeniably hip music reviews and articles in the International Herald Tribune that have entertained us for decades. Based in Paris, or, rather, stuck there, as he likes to say, the author has been a music critic for the Trib since 1979 and also had a distinguished career as a trombonist. When he was just eighteen years old, he was invited by Miles Davis to play alongside Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Max Roach in the band that was immortalized as The Birth of the Cool. This book offers a personal account of the jazz scene in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. The author writes lovingly but unsparingly about figures he knew and interviewed—such as Dexter Gordon, Freddy Heineken, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Chet Baker, Wayne Shorter, and Melvin Van Peebles. Against this background, he tells us about his own life—split allegiances to journalism and music, and to America and France, his solitary battle for sobriety, a failing marriage, and fatherhood.

Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn's music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. This book weaves together a rich array of documents—letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more—to present a balanced and fascinating picture of the composer and his work. Rejecting the received view of Mendelssohn as a facile, lightweight musician, the book demonstrates that he was in fact an innovative and highly cerebral composer who exerted a powerful influence on musical thought into the twentieth century. It discusses Mendelssohn's family background and education; the role of religion and race in his life and reputation; his experiences as practical musician (pianist, organist, string player, conductor) and as teacher and composer; the critical reception of his works; and the vicissitudes of his posthumous reputation. The book also includes a range of hitherto unpublished sketches made by Mendelssohn. The result is a portrayal of the man and his achievements as viewed through his own words and those of his contemporaries.

The commercial revolution of the seventeenth century deeply changed English culture. This book explores what that economic transformation meant to the century's greatest poet, John Milton, and to the broader literary tradition in which he worked. The book places Milton's work—as well as the writings of contemporary reformers like the Levellers, poets like John Dryden, and political economists like Sir William Petty—within the framework of England's economic history between 1601 and 1724. It demonstrates how literary history swerved in this period, as a burgeoning economic discourse pressed authors to reimagine ideas about self, community, and empire. It shows that, contrary to commonly held views, Milton was a sophisticated economic thinker. Close readings of Milton's prose and verse reveal the importance of economic ideas in a wide range of his most famous writings, from Areopagitica to Samson Agonistes to Paradise Lost.