Recently in Books
A musical challenge to our view of the past
In Musical Exoticism (Cambridge 2011) Ralph P. Locke undertook an
extensive appraisal of the portrayal of the ‘Other’ in works dating
from 1700 to the present day, an enquiry that embraced a wide range of genres
from Baroque opera to Algerian rap, and which was at once musical, cultural,
historical, political and ethical.
Is it okay to tweet during a concert, if it allows those who couldn’t attend to engage with the performance and the music? Or is it really just distracting, on top of all the coughing?
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for
musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing
for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write
About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from
those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera.
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’.
Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
An important new book on Italo Montemezzi sheds light on his opera Nave. The author/editor is David Chandler whose books on Alfredo Catalani have done so much to restore interest in the genre.
Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions.
I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of
collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate
group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now
difficult to locate.
Vincent Giroud’s valuable new French Opera, a Short History, is in hand and very welcome it is.
The noted operatic impresario and stage director, Lotfi Mansouri, with the professional help of writer Donald Arthur, has issued his memoirs under the title Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey.
Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors.
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding.
Readers may recognize the author of this book, David J. Buch, a specialist on the origins of the libretto to Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good.
Books
16 Jul 2005
The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn
The Cambridge companion series provides one of the more scholarly and intensely interesting examinations of musical composers currently available. This is because of its in-depth and multifaceted contributions to each volume, by a variety of musicologists and musicians, as well as overall management of each volume by a well-established and known scholar in the field. The Mendelssohn volume is no exception in this area. It is a collection of fourteen essays that examine the life and work of the nineteenth-century Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn. It is divided into four major sections: Issues in Biography, Situating the Compositions, Profiles of the Music, and Reception and Performance.
The Cambridge companion series provides one of the more scholarly and intensely interesting examinations of musical composers currently available. This is because of its in-depth and multifaceted contributions to each volume, by a variety of musicologists and musicians, as well as overall management of each volume by a well-established and known scholar in the field. The Mendelssohn volume is no exception in this area. It is a collection of fourteen essays that examine the life and work of the nineteenth-century Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn. It is divided into four major sections: Issues in Biography, Situating the Compositions, Profiles of the Music, and Reception and Performance.
The editor provides an introduction titled "Mendelssohn as border-dweller." Mendelssohn is an enigma: born Jewish but baptized into Protestantism at a young age; his proficiency as a composer, pianist, organist, and conductor; and his reputation and reception during his lifetime and posthumously, to name a few. The editor provides some comments and direction on these and other dichotomies, while indicating that the book itself provides only a surface introduction for the newcomer to Mendelssohn as a musical personality in nineteenth-century Romantic music.
In Part I, three essays examine biographical issues surrounding Mendelssohn. The editor writes on Mendelssohn and the institution(s) of German art music, Michael P. Steinberg examines the many and complex weavings regarding Mendelssohn and Judaism, and Marian Wilson Kimber discusses the relationship between Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny.
In Part II, two essays provide some commentary on the context of Mendelssohn's compositions within nineteenth-century Romanticism. James Garratt looks at the rise of music historicism (Mendelssohn was the first composer to champion and perform the little-known works of an obscure Baroque German composer named Johann Sebastian Bach), and Greg Vitercik speaks on how progressive Mendelssohn's compositions were through examination of the music itself.
In Part III, a number of compositions and genres are examined. Douglass Seaton provides an overview of Mendelssohn's output in the symphony and overture; Steve Lindeman examines the works for solo instrument(s) and orchestra; Thomas Schmidt-Beste discusses his chamber music; Glenn Stanley looks at the music for keyboard; R. Larry Todd has the interesting topic of sacred music, real and imaginary; Susan Youens looks at Mendelssohn's song output; and Monika Hennemann examines dramatic compositions from Liederspiel to Lorelei.
Finally, in Part IV, the fascinating posthumous reception of Mendelssohn's musical output and life are examined in two essays. John Michael Cooper provides a brief chronological history of Mendelssohn's influence (or non-influence) on Romanticism and music history up until the present day, and Leon Botstein provides an interesting analysis of Mendelssohn's originality and musical complexity in his music for orchestra and chorus.
Overall, this is a well-constructed and thought-provoking examination of Mendelssohn's life and musical works. Whether it is appropriate as reading material for the virtual newcomer to Mendelssohn, as the marketing on the back of the book mentions, is questionable. As a musicologist, I was challenged to follow the lines of reasoning and the thought processes within many of the essays; in fact, I would state that this book is more for the graduate student, music professor, and advanced music performer rather than the music novice looking for introductory information on Mendelssohn and his life. There is a brief chronology of Mendelssohn's life at the beginning of the book, and copious notes for each chapter of the book placed at the end of the book.
Dr. Brad Eden
University of Nevada, Las Vegas