Author: Bryan Gilliam Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316123154 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
Richard Strauss' fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941, make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on texts by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss's compositions.
Author: Charles Youmans Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253021669 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
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.
Author: Morten Kristiansen Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108386490 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 653
Book Description
Richard Strauss in Context offers a distinctive approach to the study of a composer in that it places the emphasis on contextualizing topics rather than on biography and artistic output. One might say that it inverts the relationship between composer and context. Rather than studies of Strauss's librettists that discuss the texts themselves and his musical settings, for instance, this book offers essays on the writers themselves: their biographical circumstances, styles, landmark works, and broader positions in literary history. Likewise, Strauss's contributions to the concert hall are positioned within the broader development of the orchestra and trends in programmatic music. In short, readers will benefit from an elaboration of material that is either absent from or treated only briefly in existing publications. Through this supplemental and broader contextual approach, this book serves as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.
Author: Charles Youmans Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139828525 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.
Author: Laurenz Lütteken Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190605707 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Richard Strauss is an outlier in the context of twentieth century music. Some consider him a composer of the late romantic period, while others declare him a traitor of modernity for his role in National Socialism. Despite the controversy surrounding him, Strauss's works--even beyond his most well-known operas Elektra and Rosenkavalier--are present in the repertories of concert halls worldwide and continue to enjoy large audiences. The details of the composer's life, however, remain shrouded in mystery and gossip. Laurenz Lütteken's Strauss presents a fresh approach to understanding this elusive composer's life and works. Dispensing with stereotypes and sensationalism, it reveals Strauss to be a sensitive intellectual and representative of modernity, with all light and shade of the turn of the twentieth century.
Author: Wayne Heisler Publisher: University Rochester Press ISBN: 1580463215 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
A richly interdisciplinary study of Strauss's contributions to ballet, his collaboration with prominent dance artists of his time, and his explorations of musical modernism.
Author: John Attridge Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1501344021 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Through a wide-ranging selection of essays representing a variety of different media, national contexts and critical approaches, this volume provides a broad overview of the idea of work in modernism, considered in its aesthetic, theoretical, historical and political dimensions. Several individual chapters discuss canonical figures, including Richard Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, but Modernist Work also addresses contexts that are chronologically and geographically foreign to the main stream of modernist studies, such as Swedish proletarian writing, Haitian nationalism and South African inheritors of Dada. Prominent historical themes include the ideas of class, revolution and the changing nature of women's work, while more conceptual chapters explore topics including autonomy, inheritance, intention, failure and intimacy. Modernist Work investigates an important but relatively neglected topic in modernist studies, demonstrating the central relevance of the concept of “work” to a diverse selection of writers and artists and opening up pathways for future research.
Author: Matthew Riley Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351573012 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 346
Book Description
Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.