Download or read book Mozart and the Enlightenment written by Nicholas Till and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1995 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating new study of Mozart's operas, Nicholas Till shows that the composer was not a "divine idiot" but an artist whose work was informed by the ideas and discoveries of his time. Examining the dramatic emergence of a modern society in eighteenth-century Austria, Till reappraises the history and meaning of the Enlightenment and Mozart's role within it. Book jacket.
Download or read book Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics written by Stephen Rumph and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics, Stephen Rumph shifts the ground of interpretation for late eighteenth century European music by reinstating the semiotics and language theory of the period. In so doing, Rumph challenges and reappraises current orthodoxies. These challenges are extremely valuable, bravely offered, and intuitively right as well as convincingly argued." —Matthew Head, author of Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music "Stephen Rumph’s book is, to my knowledge, the first successful attempt to ground classical music in its contemporaneous intellectual context. In this respect, Rumph’s book is a great achievement. It is an imaginative tour-de-force bursting with dazzling insights, and with an apparently encyclopedic range of intellectual reference in several languages." —Michael Spitzer, author of Metaphor and Musical Thought “By keeping so many things in focus at the same time, Stephen Rumph has really written several books in one: an introduction to Enlightenment theories of the sign for scholars of music; a much-needed historical context for modern musical semiotics; a sensitive new exploration of the circulation of meanings in and through Mozart’s music; and an important contribution to the ongoing integration of musicology into cultural studies. I suspect that in the course of several readings, one would come away each time with a different set of equally valuable revelations.” —Elisabeth LeGuin, author of Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology
Download or read book Mozart s Piano Concertos written by Simon P. Keefe and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2001 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the interactive relationship between the piano and the orchestra in Mozart's concertos by exploring the historical implications and hermeneutic potential of dramatic dialogue.
Download or read book Music Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart s Figaro Don Giovanni and Cos fan tutte written by Charles Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.
Download or read book The Son of Enlightenment written by Christian Jacq and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First a symphony and then a song ...Mozart can never stop composing. It's as if his life depends on it. But this deeply angers his employer, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, who will not tolerate the slightest disobedience. So the rebellious young musician decides to get away from the court of his oppressive patron once and for all by moving to Vienna, where he will finally meet the love of his life, Constance Weber. Meanwhile, Thamos, Count of Thebes and Mozart's ever-faithful Egyptian companion, accompanies him to the city. One of the last members of a spiritual brotherhood, keeping alive the secrets of the pharaohs, his mission is to find and protect the 'Great Magician' foretold by Osiris, a genius whose works will save humanity. Convinced that he has found the one in young Mozart, there is no time to lose in instructing his young protege in the Masonic rites inspired by the Egyptian Great Mysteries. But in doing so, Thamos and Mozart find themselves in great danger. For the governing powers will not tolerate what they take to be the first steps towards revolution ...
Download or read book Mozart written by Jan Swafford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Download or read book Mozart written by Roye E. Wates and published by Amadeus Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Amadeus). Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths explores in detail 20 of the composer's major works in the context of his tragically brief life and the turbulent times in which he lived. Addressed to non-musicians seeking to deepen their technical appreciation for his music while learning more about Mozart the man than the caricature portrayed in the 1986 movie Amadeus , this book offers extensive biographical and historical background debunking many well-established Mozart myths along with guided study of compositions representing every genre of 18th-century music: opera, concerto, symphony, church music, divertimento and serenade, sonata, and string quartet. Author Roye E. Wates, a Mozart specialist, has taught music history to thousands of non-musicians, both undergraduates and adults, as a Professor of Music at Boston University and from 2002-2004 as director of Boston University's Adult Music Seminar at Tanglewood, summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths provides a unique combination of biographical detail, up-to-date research, detailed musical analyses, and clear definitions of terms. Amateurs as well as more advanced musicians will gain a greater understanding of Mozart's encyclopedic mastery.
Download or read book Mozart s Last Aria written by Matt Rees and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Matt Rees takes readers to 18th centuryAustria, where Mozart’s estranged sister Nannerl stumblesinto a world of ambition, conspiracy, and immortal music while attempting touncover the truth about her brother’s suspicious death. Did Mozart’s life endin murder? Nannerl must brave dire circumstances tofind out, running afoul of the secret police, the freemasons, and even theAustrian Emperor himself as she delves into a scandal greater than she had everimagined. With captivating historical details, compelling characters, and areal-life mystery upon which everything hinges, Rees—the award-winning authorof the internationally acclaimed Omar Yussefcrime series—writes in the tradition of Irvin Yalom’sWhen Nietzsche Wept, Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye, andPhillip Sington’s The Einstein Girl to achievethe very best in historical fiction with Mozart’s Last Aria.
Download or read book Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven written by Martin Nedbal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about German national theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics, state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and national identity in theater further transformed in response to the crisis of Emperor Joseph II’s reform movement, the revolutionary ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals in theatrical performances through the institution of theater censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic works (such as Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio) that eventually became the cornerstones for later developments of German culture.
Download or read book Opera Ideas written by Paul A. Robinson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera and Ideas is a study of the connections between music and intellectual history. Through lucid analysis of six operas and two song cycles, Paul Robinson shows how operas give musical and dramatic expression to ideas about the self, society, and history.
Download or read book Cherubino s Leap written by Richard Kramer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Preliminaries -- 1. The Chromatic Moment in Enlightenment Thought -- Moments Musicaux -- 2. The Fugal Moment: On a Few Bars in Mozart's Quintet in C Major, K. 515 -- 3. Hearing the Silence: On a Much-Theorized Moment in a Sonata by Emanuel Bach -- The Klopstock Moment -- 4. Oden von Klopstock in Musik gesetzt ... -- 5. Composing Klopstock: Gluck contra Bach -- 6. Beethoven: In Search of Klopstock -- Dramma per Musica -- 7. Anagnorisis: Gluck and the Theater of Recognition -- 8. Cherubino's Leap -- 9. Konstanze's Tears -- Works Cited -- Index
Download or read book Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart written by Piero Melograni and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Mozart s Operas written by Mozart and published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classics.
Download or read book The Original Portrayal of Mozart s Don Giovanni written by Magnus Tessing Schneider and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship written by Patricia Ann Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Addresses censorship as a worldwide issue from its earliest recorded form to the modern day ; Includes unique case studies of music censorship unfamiliar to Western audiences ; Documents censorship through a necessarily intersectional lens." --Oxford University Press.
Download or read book Mozart written by Hans Küng and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much Has Been Written about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but relatively little on the religious dimension of his person and his music. In this book Hans Kung offers an intriguing theological probing into Mozart's musical work. Kung begins by discussing Mozart's Catholic background--something that, surprisingly, has hardly been treated by Mozart scholars. He moves on to explore how Mozart's music itself displays to the keen ear "traces of transcendence," giving intimations of a mysterious bliss transcending even all music.
Download or read book The Politics of Opera written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.
