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Containing studies on Wagner, Strauss and Britten, this Holloway's collection of writings includes a piece on Edward Elgar. Shorter pieces cover individual composers and particular works as well as individuals and issues in musical life, as Holloway considers the Twentieth Century as a contradictory yet unified whole.
This volume contains nearly all the criticism that Alexander Coleman wrote for The New Criterion between 1994 and 2003. A specialist in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American literature, Coleman was also a superb essayist on music, and his wide erudition, as revealed in these writings, demonstrates an easy mastery of the entire modernist tradition. Diversions and Animadversions is divided into three parts. The first contains Coleman's literary essays including a lengthy piece on Eba de Quieros, the great master of Portuguese realism, and shorter pieces on the Argentinian writer and Borges disciple, Adolfo Bioy Casares, as well as a review of the most recent translation of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. Coleman's greatest passion, however, was for music, and part two contains essays, concert and book reviews, and reports on the cultural situation of music. Among the subjects examined here are the operas of Schoenberg, Berg, Richard Strauss, the recently published letters of Toscanini, the music criticism of Virgil Thomson, the fluctuating critical reputation of Jean Sibelius, and the authentic performance practice movement, along with considerations of such instrumentalists as Sviatoslav Richter and Alicia de Larrocha. The book concludes with Coleman's travel writings, which are both evocative mood pieces and incisive social and political commentary. Graced with personal appreciations by Roger Kimball and Denis Donoghue, this volume encapsulates the work of a writer of rare wit, capacious learning, and eager, if gently ironical, curiosity.
Sonya Rhie Quintanilla is the Curator of Asian Art at The San Diego Museum of Art. --Book Jacket.
The composer Robin Holloway has established himself as one of the most penetrating music critics of our day, whose trenchant style and impassioned thinking guide us not only through the works of his contemporaries, but also through the great masterpieces of Western Music. This remarkable collection of essays contains some of the most exciting and original analysis of the Wagner operas available in print. It also brings us sustained, meditative, and illuminating accounts of the masterpieces of the romantic era, and of the classical tradition from which they both derive. Holloway argues that music matters, that there is a real difference between good and bad, great and trivial, sincere and sentimental, and that our enjoyment can only be enhanced by the habit of critical study.
Excerpt from The Phantom Journal: And Other Essays and Diversions If I were William Cowper, Esq., of Olney, I should put the following questions into melodious and easily-memorized verse but instead they are in prose. Who is it, when we are lost, that tells us the way, always extending an arm as he does so? The policeman. Who is it that knows where the nearest Chemist's is? The policeman. Who, when we are in danger of being run over if we cross the road, lifts a hand like a York ham and cleaves a path for us The policeman. At night, when we have lost the latch-key, who is it that effects an entrance (i borrow his own terminology) through a window? The policeman. The tale of his benefactions is endless. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.