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The repertoire of the early Viennese ballroom was highly influential in the broader histories of both social dance and music in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet music scholarship has traditionally paid little attention to ballroom dance music before the era of the Strauss dynasty, with the exception of a handful of dances by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This book positions Viennese social dances in their specific performing contexts and investigates the wider repertoire of the Viennese ballroom in the decades around 1800, most of which stems from dozens of non-canonical composers. Close examination of this material yields new insights into the social contexts associated with familiar dance types, and reveals that the ballroom repertoire of this period connected with virtually every aspect of Viennese musical life, from opera and concert music to the emerging category of entertainment music that was later exemplified by the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.
A unique window on the world of nineteenth-century amateur music-making provided by the study of domestic musical arrangements of opera.
Reveals how the culture and repertoire of the early Viennese ballroom permeated and intersected with other areas of musical life.
The music of the Strauss family – Johann and his three sons, Johann, Josef and Eduard – enjoys enormous popular appeal. Yet existing biographies have failed to do justice to the family's true significance in nineteenth and early twentieth-century musical history. David Wyn Jones addresses this deficiency, engagingly showing that – from Johann's first engagements in the mid-1820s to the death of Eduard in 1916 – the music making of the family was at the centre of Habsburg Viennese society as it moved between dance hall, concert hall and theatre. The Strauss industry at its height was, he demonstrates, greater than any one of the individuals, with serious personal and domestic consequences including affairs, illness, rivalry and fraud. This zesty biography, spanning over a hundred years of history, brings the dynasty brilliantly to life across a large canvas as it offers fresh and revealing insights into the cultural life of Vienna as a whole.
Vienna has been the locale for nearly one hundred and fifty films and television productions in English, from 1920s through the first years of this century, with imaginative representations of Freud, Strauss, Franz Josef, Mozart, Beethoven, and Klimt; mad scientists, assassins, spies, refugees, romantics, and American professors; historical dramas, cartoons, documentaries, and Hitchcock's only musical comedy. The "City of Dreams" has appeared as an imperial court, a center of scientific and medical research, a Jewish and Catholic homeland, a locus of international espionage and domestic crime, the destination for innocents abroad, the birthplace of the waltz, a stage for performances and performers, and the site for romantic rendezvous. For many in English-language audiences, such productions have constituted the most significant representations of Vienna, a city that historically has been the capital of one of Europe's largest empires, one of the most important centers for classical music and opera, both a victim and an accomplice of Nazi Germany, and the home of international diplomacy. Cultural historians and Austrian writers have provided significant commentary on the city, but their influence has seldom reached such an extensive audience as the films and television productions screening Vienna for English-language audiences. Screening Vienna thus analyzes the representation of Vienna and the Viennese in English-language film and television, reviews the critical reception of these productions, and measures the representations against the cultural and historical contexts and the writings of contemporary Austrian writers.The book is unique in its scope (over one hundred and fifty productions from the 1920s to 2013) and in its inclusion of leading reviews of many films, references to cultural and historical studies of Vienna, and references to modern and contemporary Austrian fiction.Thus the analysis is more extensive in its coverage and more intensive in its analysis of each film than any previous study, with a focus on scene, language, plot, characterization, and the reception of these films. Scholars and students in American cultural studies, film studies, Austrian and Viennese history, and popular culture will find the book informative and essential for studies of Vienna in the American and British imagination. Given the extensive coverage and filmography, many libraries should also view the book as a reference work, in addition to its status in cultural and film studies. The book will also be useful for film studies and American popular culture studies courses at advanced or graduate level.
Historians have long tried to place the music of Haydn and Mozart in the lineage of German Lutheran music. In this book, Daniel Heartz shows that the first Viennese school grew from a Catholic inheritance in Italian music and from local tradition, with an admixture of French currents. The generation of composers led by Haydn no longer trained in Italy. By the time young Mozart joined the ranks of the Viennese school, its accomplishments towered above all others of the time. The author's approach can be compared to viewing a majestic mountain range in its totality: the highest peaks take on even greater majesty when seen in their natural context of foothills and lesser peaks. This is how Haydn and Mozart were viewed by their contemporaries, whose world of perception Heartz recreates, using, among other things, the visual art of the period. His focus is on music as a part of cultural history at a particular time and place. Stylistic terms and a priori periods matter less to him than the common denominators of geography, culture, and political history. Book jacket.
If for no other reasons than because of the long time and monumental patience expended upon its preparation, the vicissitudes through which it has passed and the varied and arduous labors bestowed upon it by the author and his editors, the history of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven deserves to be set forth as an introduction to this work. His work it is, and his monument, though others have labored long and painstakingly upon it. There has been no considerable time since the middle of the last century when it has not occupied the minds of the author and those who have been associated with him in its creation. Between the conception of its plan and its execution there lies a period of more than two generations. Four men have labored zealously and affectionately upon its pages, and the fruits of more than four score men, stimulated to investigation by the first revelations made by the author, have been conserved in the ultimate form of the biography. It was seventeen years after Mr. Thayer entered upon what proved to be his life-task before he gave the first volume to the world—and then in a foreign tongue; it was thirteen more before the third volume came from the press. This volume, moreover, left the work unfinished, and thirty-two years more had to elapse before it was completed. When this was done the patient and self-sacrificing investigator was dead; he did not live to finish it himself nor to see it finished by his faithful collaborator of many years, Dr. Deiters; neither did he live to look upon a single printed page in the language in which he had written that portion of the work published in his lifetime. It was left for another hand to prepare the English edition of an American writer’s history of Germany’s greatest tone-poet, and to write its concluding chapters, as he believes, in the spirit of the original author. Under these circumstances there can be no vainglory in asserting that the appearance of this edition of Thayer’s Life of Beethoven deserves to be set down as a significant occurrence in musical history. In it is told for the first time in the language of the great biographer the true story of the man Beethoven—his history stripped of the silly sentimental romance with which early writers and their later imitators and copyists invested it so thickly that the real humanity, the humanliness, of the composer has never been presented to the world. In this biography there appears the veritable Beethoven set down in his true environment of men and things—the man as he actually was, the man as he himself, like Cromwell, asked to be shown for the information of posterity. It is doubtful if any other great man’s history has been so encrusted with fiction as Beethoven’s. Except Thayer’s, no biography of him has been written which presents him in his true light. The majority of the books which have been written of late years repeat many of the errors and falsehoods made current in the first books which were written about him. A great many of these errors and falsehoods are in the account of the composer’s last sickness and death, and were either inventions or exaggerations designed by their utterers to add pathos to a narrative which in unadorned truth is a hundredfold more pathetic than any tale of fiction could possibly be. Other errors have concealed the truth in the story of Beethoven’s guardianship of his nephew, his relations with his brothers, the origin and nature of his fatal illness, his dealings with his publishers and patrons, the generous attempt of the Philharmonic Society of London to extend help to him when upon his deathbed.
Relaxed and accessible in style, this authoritative guide is the first symphony handbook for non-musicians. The book begins with a general introduction to the symphony and short pieces on the orchestra and musical styles. Mordden goes on to describe, chronologically, over 700 pieces--from Vivaldi to twentieth-century composers. Further aids to the reader include two lists of repertory builders and a glossary of musical terms. Easy and pleasurable to read...a genuinely useful guide for the music lover who has not had a musical education but loves concert music.--John Barkham Reviews