Download or read book Great Wagner Conductors written by Jonathan Brown and published by Parrot Press. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the Ebook version of the award-winning "Great Wagner Conductors" published in 2012, now scarce in print. It contains corrections to the hardback edition, and remedies some omissions to the discographies. It also contains all 723 illustrations in the book, brilliantly illuminated, many showing the conductors at work. Some of these are rare, some are in colour. (These are not displayed in the free sample.) "Great Wagner Conductors" is the first in-depth study to bring the great historical Wagner conductors to life - through anecdote, their own views on Wagner’s music, reports of their performances throughout the world, and their recordings. There is a substantial introductory chapter on Wagner - what he was like as a conductor of his own works and what he wanted of his conductors – then follow chapters on Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, Anton Seidl, Hermann Levi, Felix Mottl, Karl Muck, Artur Nikisch, Albert Coates, Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner, Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Artur Bodanzky, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Karl Böhm, Richard Strauss, Otto Klemperer, and Fritz Reiner. Thousands of reviews of performances from many countries have been distilled to bring us as close as we can to knowing what the conductors were really like. There are comprehensive discographies setting out what the conductors recorded. Rare recordings are documented. There is comment on or excerpts from reviews of all the major recordings, and on many of the more obscure. A section on timings of actual and recorded performances, from Wagner onwards, reveals how widely practice has varied. There is a Select Bibliography, and an Index. "The level of detail achieved is quite breathtaking," wrote David Patmore in "Classical Recordings Quarterly" reviewing the hardback, "It extends to a vast arsenal of footnotes … as a resource they will be amazingly useful in a vast range of different contexts…. For anyone interested in conducting from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and in particular the performance of Wagner, this book will be an essential acquisition. Its strength lies in the collection of so many different and varied contemporary reports of Wagner in performance from approximately 1850 to 1960. If this is where your interest lies, it will provide much fascinating reading." (Winter 2012). "Great Wagner Conductors is a major contribution to the literature on this subject," wrote Gary Galo in the "ARSC Journal", "and belongs in the library of every serious Wagner enthusiast." (May 2013). The book was awarded an Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in 2013.
Download or read book On Conducting written by Richard Wagner and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Virtuoso Conductors written by Raymond Holden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert's guide to the skills of the greatest conductors
Download or read book On Conducting written by Richard Wagner and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following pages are intended to form a record of my experience in a department of music which has hitherto been left to professional routine and amateur criticism. I shall appeal to professional executants, both instrumentalists and vocalists, rather than to conductors; since the executants only can tell whether, or not, they have been led by a competent conductor. I do not mean to set up a system, but simply to state certain facts, and record a number of practical observations.
Download or read book The Great Conductors written by Harold C. Schonberg and published by New York : Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1967 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "'He is of commanding presence, infinite dignity, fabulous memory, vast experience, high temperament and serene wisdom. He has been tempered in the crucible but he is still molten and he glows with a fierce inner light. He is many things: musician, administrator, executive, minister, psychologist, technician, philosopher and dispenser of wrath. Like many great men, he has come from humble stock; and, like many great men in the public eye, he is instinctively an actor. As such, he is an egoist. He has to be. Without infinite belief in himself and his capabilities, he is as nothing. Above all, he is a leader of men. His subjects look to him for guidance. He is at once a father image, the great provider, the fount of inspiration, the Teacher who knows all ... . He has but to stretch out his hand and he is obeyed. He tolerates no opposition. His will, his word, his very glance, are law.' With this pyrotechnical description of the genus, Harold Schonberg begins his historical survey of the Great Conductors and their art. For the great conductor--from the time-beater of the thirteenth century to the maestro of today--is always the inspired leader who can impose his authority on the musicians who make up his orchestra. Thus it was with Bach, whom Schonberg pictures leading his forces seated at the clavier or with violin at his shoulder, and singing any part that was being wrongly performed. Thus it was with Handel, who threatened to throw a prima donna out of the window if she would not sing the notes as written. Thus it was even with Beethoven, because of his deafness a tragically bad conductor, who nevertheless tried to impose his will on the performers by practically creeping under the desk for pianissimo and jumping high with outstretched arms for the opposite. Before us through the pages of this book march the great conductors of the past and of the present. Schonberg evokes Lully, who beat time on the floor with a cane--so powerfully that he drove it into his foot on one occasion and died of the resulting gangrene. We meet Berlioz, 'in constant motion on the podium, exuding electricity ... who held absolute sway over his troops and played on them as a pianist upon the keyboard,' and Mendelssohn, the gentle, well-mannered aristocrat who ripped up scores and screamed at musicians who showed up drunk and fractious. And so through all the important composer-conductors--Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, Strauss. Then the moderns: the elemental Arturo Toscanini, the loving Bruno Walter, the witty and acrimonious Thomas Beecham--on and on to the youngest to earn a chapter to himself, the phenomenal Leonard Bernstein. With biography, anecdote, vivid description, and more than a hundred well-chosen prints and photographs, Mr. Schonberg gives a striking picture of each of these men, and dozens of others, showing just how and why they influenced the performance of classical music and how they developed a new and modern art--the art of conducting."--Dust jacket.
Download or read book Mahler and Strauss written by Charles Youmans and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.
Download or read book On Conducting Ueber Das Dirigiren written by Richard Wagner and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My Life with Wagner written by Christian Thielemann and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Idiosyncratic, humorous, enlightening and written by one of the finest conductors alive ... This is the book to buy if you are going to see Wagner or listen to him at home' LITERARY REVIEW Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. MY LIFE WITH WAGNER chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood. Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner - from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. Next he takes each opera in turn, his appraisal illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure. The result is a richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.
Download or read book The Great Conductors written by Harold C. Schonberg and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1967 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "'He is of commanding presence, infinite dignity, fabulous memory, vast experience, high temperament and serene wisdom. He has been tempered in the crucible but he is still molten and he glows with a fierce inner light. He is many things: musician, administrator, executive, minister, psychologist, technician, philosopher and dispenser of wrath. Like many great men, he has come from humble stock; and, like many great men in the public eye, he is instinctively an actor. As such, he is an egoist. He has to be. Without infinite belief in himself and his capabilities, he is as nothing. Above all, he is a leader of men. His subjects look to him for guidance. He is at once a father image, the great provider, the fount of inspiration, the Teacher who knows all ... . He has but to stretch out his hand and he is obeyed. He tolerates no opposition. His will, his word, his very glance, are law.' With this pyrotechnical description of the genus, Harold Schonberg begins his historical survey of the Great Conductors and their art. For the great conductor--from the time-beater of the thirteenth century to the maestro of today--is always the inspired leader who can impose his authority on the musicians who make up his orchestra. Thus it was with Bach, whom Schonberg pictures leading his forces seated at the clavier or with violin at his shoulder, and singing any part that was being wrongly performed. Thus it was with Handel, who threatened to throw a prima donna out of the window if she would not sing the notes as written. Thus it was even with Beethoven, because of his deafness a tragically bad conductor, who nevertheless tried to impose his will on the performers by practically creeping under the desk for pianissimo and jumping high with outstretched arms for the opposite. Before us through the pages of this book march the great conductors of the past and of the present. Schonberg evokes Lully, who beat time on the floor with a cane--so powerfully that he drove it into his foot on one occasion and died of the resulting gangrene. We meet Berlioz, 'in constant motion on the podium, exuding electricity ... who held absolute sway over his troops and played on them as a pianist upon the keyboard,' and Mendelssohn, the gentle, well-mannered aristocrat who ripped up scores and screamed at musicians who showed up drunk and fractious. And so through all the important composer-conductors--Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, Strauss. Then the moderns: the elemental Arturo Toscanini, the loving Bruno Walter, the witty and acrimonious Thomas Beecham--on and on to the youngest to earn a chapter to himself, the phenomenal Leonard Bernstein. With biography, anecdote, vivid description, and more than a hundred well-chosen prints and photographs, Mr. Schonberg gives a striking picture of each of these men, and dozens of others, showing just how and why they influenced the performance of classical music and how they developed a new and modern art--the art of conducting."--Dust jacket.
Download or read book On Conducting written by Richard Wagner and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Conducting (�eber Das Dirigiren) : A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical MusicBy Richard Wagner,
Download or read book Wagner on Conducting written by Richard Wagner and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wagner initiated the Romantic image of the conductor as a fiery, omniscient dictator of the podium. This work collects his eloquent essays on role of the conductor, musical interpretation, and many other topics. Originally printed in 1887, it remains an exciting and valid resource for the modern reader.
Download or read book On Conducting written by Anton Seidl and published by Parrot Press. This book was released on 2014-01-22 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A facsimile of the first, illustrated, edition of Seidl's essay "On Conducting" published in 1895. Seidl is the only one of Wagner's conductors to have written in detail about the way the composer's works should be performed. Along with Wagner's own tract "On Conducting" (1869), Seidl's essay is of great importance.
Download or read book On Conducting written by Richard Wagner and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bonded Leather binding
Download or read book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.
Download or read book Studies in Musical Genesis Structure and Interpretation written by William Kinderman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career, and offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of 'Parsifal' that illuminates the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar sketches and manuscript sources held at Bayreuth, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works.
Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan 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, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
Download or read book My Life with Wagner written by Christian Thielemann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has emerged as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. My Life with Wagner chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood. Thielemann retraces his journey around the world—from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago—and combines analysis with revealing insights drawn from Thielemann's many years of experience as a Wagner conductor. Thielemann takes on each of Wagner's opera in turn, and his appraisal is illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores, and the inside perspective of a world-class practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today Wagner is venerated and reviled in equal measure. A richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.
